Generating symbolic music using diffusion models

Probabilistic Denoising Diffusion models have emerged as simple yet very powerful generative models. Diffusion models unlike other generative models do not suffer from mode collapse nor require a discriminator to generate high quality samples. In this paper, we propose a diffusion model that uses a binomial prior distribution to generate piano-rolls. The paper also proposes an efficient method to train the model and generate samples. The generated music has coherence at time scales up to the length of the training piano-roll segments. We show how such a model is conditioned on the input and can be used to harmonize a given melody, complete an incomplete piano-roll or generate a variation of a given piece. The code is shared publicly to encourage the use and development of the method by the community.