Symbolic Music Representations for Classification Tasks: A Systematic Evaluation

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) has seen a recent surge in deep learning-based approaches, which often involve encoding symbolic music (i.e., music represented in terms of discrete note events) in an image-like or language like fashion. However, symbolic music is neither an image nor a sentence, and research in the symbolic domain lacks a comprehensive overview of the different available representations. In this paper, we investigate matrix (piano roll), sequence, and graph representations and their corresponding neural architectures, in combination with symbolic scores and performances on three piece-level classification tasks. We also introduce a novel graph representation for symbolic performances and explore the capability of graph representations in global classification tasks. Our systematic evaluation shows advantages and limitations of each input representation. Our results suggest that the graph representation, as the newest and least explored among the three approaches, exhibits promising performance, while being more light-weight in training

음악적 요소에 대한 조건부 생성의 개선에 관한 연구: 화음과 표현을 중심으로

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 융합과학기술대학원 융합과학부(디지털정보융합전공), 2023. 2. 이교구.Conditional generation of musical components (CGMC) creates a part of music based on partial musical components such as melody or chord. CGMC is beneficial for discovering complex relationships among musical attributes. It can also assist non-experts who face difficulties in making music. However, recent studies for CGMC are still facing two challenges in terms of generation quality and model controllability. First, the structure of the generated music is not robust. Second, only limited ranges of musical factors and tasks have been examined as targets for flexible control of generation. In this thesis, we aim to mitigate these two challenges to improve the CGMC systems. For musical structure, we focus on intuitive modeling of musical hierarchy to help the model explicitly learn musically meaningful dependency. To this end, we utilize alignment paths between the raw music data and the musical units such as notes or chords. For musical creativity, we facilitate smooth control of novel musical attributes using latent representations. We attempt to achieve disentangled representations of the intended factors by regularizing them with data-driven inductive bias. This thesis verifies the proposed approaches particularly in two representative CGMC tasks, melody harmonization and expressive performance rendering. A variety of experimental results show the possibility of the proposed approaches to expand musical creativity under stable generation quality.음악적 요소를 조건부 생성하는 분야인 CGMC는 멜로디나 화음과 같은 음악의 일부분을 기반으로 나머지 부분을 생성하는 것을 목표로 한다. 이 분야는 음악적 요소 간 복잡한 관계를 탐구하는 데 용이하고, 음악을 만드는 데 어려움을 겪는 비전문가들을 도울 수 있다. 최근 연구들은 딥러닝 기술을 활용하여 CGMC 시스템의 성능을 높여왔다. 하지만, 이러한 연구들에는 아직 생성 품질과 제어가능성 측면에서 두 가지의 한계점이 있다. 먼저, 생성된 음악의 음악적 구조가 명확하지 않다. 또한, 아직 좁은 범위의 음악적 요소 및 테스크만이 유연한 제어의 대상으로서 탐구되었다. 이에 본 학위논문에서는 CGMC의 개선을 위해 위 두 가지의 한계점을 해결하고자 한다. 첫 번째로, 음악 구조를 이루는 음악적 위계를 직관적으로 모델링하는 데 집중하고자 한다. 본래 데이터와 음, 화음과 같은 음악적 단위 간 정렬 경로를 사용하여 모델이 음악적으로 의미있는 종속성을 명확하게 배울 수 있도록 한다. 두 번째로, 잠재 표상을 활용하여 새로운 음악적 요소들을 유연하게 제어하고자 한다. 특히 잠재 표상이 의도된 요소에 대해 풀리도록 훈련하기 위해서 비지도 혹은 자가지도 학습 프레임워크을 사용하여 잠재 표상을 제한하도록 한다. 본 학위논문에서는 CGMC 분야의 대표적인 두 테스크인 멜로디 하모나이제이션 및 표현적 연주 렌더링 테스크에 대해 위의 두 가지 방법론을 검증한다. 다양한 실험적 결과들을 통해 제안한 방법론이 CGMC 시스템의 음악적 창의성을 안정적인 생성 품질로 확장할 수 있다는 가능성을 시사한다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 5 1.2 Definitions 8 1.3 Tasks of Interest 10 1.3.1 Generation Quality 10 1.3.2 Controllability 12 1.4 Approaches 13 1.4.1 Modeling Musical Hierarchy 14 1.4.2 Regularizing Latent Representations 16 1.4.3 Target Tasks 18 1.5 Outline of the Thesis 19 Chapter 2 Background 22 2.1 Music Generation Tasks 23 2.1.1 Melody Harmonization 23 2.1.2 Expressive Performance Rendering 25 2.2 Structure-enhanced Music Generation 27 2.2.1 Hierarchical Music Generation 27 2.2.2 Transformer-based Music Generation 28 2.3 Disentanglement Learning 29 2.3.1 Unsupervised Approaches 30 2.3.2 Supervised Approaches 30 2.3.3 Self-supervised Approaches 31 2.4 Controllable Music Generation 32 2.4.1 Score Generation 32 2.4.2 Performance Rendering 33 2.5 Summary 34 Chapter 3 Translating Melody to Chord: Structured and Flexible Harmonization of Melody with Transformer 36 3.1 Introduction 36 3.2 Proposed Methods 41 3.2.1 Standard Transformer Model (STHarm) 41 3.2.2 Variational Transformer Model (VTHarm) 44 3.2.3 Regularized Variational Transformer Model (rVTHarm) 46 3.2.4 Training Objectives 47 3.3 Experimental Settings 48 3.3.1 Datasets 49 3.3.2 Comparative Methods 50 3.3.3 Training 50 3.3.4 Metrics 51 3.4 Evaluation 56 3.4.1 Chord Coherence and Diversity 57 3.4.2 Harmonic Similarity to Human 59 3.4.3 Controlling Chord Complexity 60 3.4.4 Subjective Evaluation 62 3.4.5 Qualitative Results 67 3.4.6 Ablation Study 73 3.5 Conclusion and Future Work 74 Chapter 4 Sketching the Expression: Flexible Rendering of Expressive Piano Performance with Self-supervised Learning 76 4.1 Introduction 76 4.2 Proposed Methods 79 4.2.1 Data Representation 79 4.2.2 Modeling Musical Hierarchy 80 4.2.3 Overall Network Architecture 81 4.2.4 Regularizing the Latent Variables 84 4.2.5 Overall Objective 86 4.3 Experimental Settings 87 4.3.1 Dataset and Implementation 87 4.3.2 Comparative Methods 88 4.4 Evaluation 88 4.4.1 Generation Quality 89 4.4.2 Disentangling Latent Representations 90 4.4.3 Controllability of Expressive Attributes 91 4.4.4 KL Divergence 93 4.4.5 Ablation Study 94 4.4.6 Subjective Evaluation 95 4.4.7 Qualitative Examples 97 4.4.8 Extent of Control 100 4.5 Conclusion 102 Chapter 5 Conclusion and Future Work 103 5.1 Conclusion 103 5.2 Future Work 106 5.2.1 Deeper Investigation of Controllable Factors 106 5.2.2 More Analysis of Qualitative Evaluation Results 107 5.2.3 Improving Diversity and Scale of Dataset 108 Bibliography 109 초 록 137박