Enhance audio generation controllability through representation similarity regularization

This paper presents an innovative approach to enhance control over audio generation by emphasizing the alignment between audio and text representations during model training. In the context of language model-based audio generation, the model leverages input from both textual and audio token representations to predict subsequent audio tokens. However, the current configuration lacks explicit regularization to ensure the alignment between the chosen text representation and the language model's predictions. Our proposal involves the incorporation of audio and text representation regularization, particularly during the classifier-free guidance (CFG) phase, where the text condition is excluded from cross attention during language model training. The aim of this proposed representation regularization is to minimize discrepancies in audio and text similarity compared to other samples within the same training batch. Experimental results on both music and audio generation tasks demonstrate that our proposed methods lead to improvements in objective metrics for both audio and music generation, as well as an enhancement in the human perception for audio generation.

AI-Based Affective Music Generation Systems: A Review of Methods, and Challenges

Music is a powerful medium for altering the emotional state of the listener. In recent years, with significant advancement in computing capabilities, artificial intelligence-based (AI-based) approaches have become popular for creating affective music generation (AMG) systems that are empowered with the ability to generate affective music. Entertainment, healthcare, and sensor-integrated interactive system design are a few of the areas in which AI-based affective music generation (AI-AMG) systems may have a significant impact. Given the surge of interest in this topic, this article aims to provide a comprehensive review of AI-AMG systems. The main building blocks of an AI-AMG system are discussed, and existing systems are formally categorized based on the core algorithm used for music generation. In addition, this article discusses the main musical features employed to compose affective music, along with the respective AI-based approaches used for tailoring them. Lastly, the main challenges and open questions in this field, as well as their potential solutions, are presented to guide future research. We hope that this review will be useful for readers seeking to understand the state-of-the-art in AI-AMG systems, and gain an overview of the methods used for developing them, thereby helping them explore this field in the future.

Improving Emotional Expression and Cohesion in Image-Based Playlist Description and Music Topics: A Continuous Parameterization Approach

Text generation in image-based platforms, particularly for music-related content, requires precise control over text styles and the incorporation of emotional expression. However, existing approaches often need help to control the proportion of external factors in generated text and rely on discrete inputs, lacking continuous control conditions for desired text generation. This study proposes Continuous Parameterization for Controlled Text Generation (CPCTG) to overcome these limitations. Our approach leverages a Language Model (LM) as a style learner, integrating Semantic Cohesion (SC) and Emotional Expression Proportion (EEP) considerations. By enhancing the reward method and manipulating the CPCTG level, our experiments on playlist description and music topic generation tasks demonstrate significant improvements in ROUGE scores, indicating enhanced relevance and coherence in the generated text.

Automatic Music Playlist Generation via Simulation-based Reinforcement Learning

Personalization of playlists is a common feature in music streaming services, but conventional techniques, such as collaborative filtering, rely on explicit assumptions regarding content quality to learn how to make recommendations. Such assumptions often result in misalignment between offline model objectives and online user satisfaction metrics. In this paper, we present a reinforcement learning framework that solves for such limitations by directly optimizing for user satisfaction metrics via the use of a simulated playlist-generation environment. Using this simulator we develop and train a modified Deep Q-Network, the action head DQN (AH-DQN), in a manner that addresses the challenges imposed by the large state and action space of our RL formulation. The resulting policy is capable of making recommendations from large and dynamic sets of candidate items with the expectation of maximizing consumption metrics. We analyze and evaluate agents offline via simulations that use environment models trained on both public and proprietary streaming datasets. We show how these agents lead to better user-satisfaction metrics compared to baseline methods during online A/B tests. Finally, we demonstrate that performance assessments produced from our simulator are strongly correlated with observed online metric results.

musicaiz: A Python Library for Symbolic Music Generation, Analysis and Visualization

In this article, we present musicaiz, an object-oriented library for analyzing, generating and evaluating symbolic music. The submodules of the package allow the user to create symbolic music data from scratch, build algorithms to analyze symbolic music, encode MIDI data as tokens to train deep learning sequence models, modify existing music data and evaluate music generation systems. The evaluation submodule builds on previous work to objectively measure music generation systems and to be able to reproduce the results of music generation models. The library is publicly available online. We encourage the community to contribute and provide feedback.

MusicAgent: An AI Agent for Music Understanding and Generation with Large Language Models

AI-empowered music processing is a diverse field that encompasses dozens of tasks, ranging from generation tasks (e.g., timbre synthesis) to comprehension tasks (e.g., music classification). For developers and amateurs, it is very difficult to grasp all of these task to satisfy their requirements in music processing, especially considering the huge differences in the representations of music data and the model applicability across platforms among various tasks. Consequently, it is necessary to build a system to organize and integrate these tasks, and thus help practitioners to automatically analyze their demand and call suitable tools as solutions to fulfill their requirements. Inspired by the recent success of large language models (LLMs) in task automation, we develop a system, named MusicAgent, which integrates numerous music-related tools and an autonomous workflow to address user requirements. More specifically, we build 1) toolset that collects tools from diverse sources, including Hugging Face, GitHub, and Web API, etc. 2) an autonomous workflow empowered by LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) to organize these tools and automatically decompose user requests into multiple sub-tasks and invoke corresponding music tools. The primary goal of this system is to free users from the intricacies of AI-music tools, enabling them to concentrate on the creative aspect. By granting users the freedom to effortlessly combine tools, the system offers a seamless and enriching music experience.

Vis2Mus: Exploring Multimodal Representation Mapping for Controllable Music Generation

In this study, we explore the representation mapping from the domain of visual arts to the domain of music, with which we can use visual arts as an effective handle to control music generation. Unlike most studies in multimodal representation learning that are purely data-driven, we adopt an analysis-by-synthesis approach that combines deep music representation learning with user studies. Such an approach enables us to discover \textit{interpretable} representation mapping without a huge amount of paired data. In particular, we discover that visual-to-music mapping has a nice property similar to equivariant. In other words, we can use various image transformations, say, changing brightness, changing contrast, style transfer, to control the corresponding transformations in the music domain. In addition, we released the Vis2Mus system as a controllable interface for symbolic music generation.

A Unified Framework for Multimodal, Multi-Part Human Motion Synthesis

The field has made significant progress in synthesizing realistic human motion driven by various modalities. Yet, the need for different methods to animate various body parts according to different control signals limits the scalability of these techniques in practical scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a cohesive and scalable approach that consolidates multimodal (text, music, speech) and multi-part (hand, torso) human motion generation. Our methodology unfolds in several steps: We begin by quantizing the motions of diverse body parts into separate codebooks tailored to their respective domains. Next, we harness the robust capabilities of pre-trained models to transcode multimodal signals into a shared latent space. We then translate these signals into discrete motion tokens by iteratively predicting subsequent tokens to form a complete sequence. Finally, we reconstruct the continuous actual motion from this tokenized sequence. Our method frames the multimodal motion generation challenge as a token prediction task, drawing from specialized codebooks based on the modality of the control signal. This approach is inherently scalable, allowing for the easy integration of new modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of our design, emphasizing its potential for broad application.

Polyffusion: A Diffusion Model for Polyphonic Score Generation with Internal and External Controls

We propose Polyffusion, a diffusion model that generates polyphonic music scores by regarding music as image-like piano roll representations. The model is capable of controllable music generation with two paradigms: internal control and external control. Internal control refers to the process in which users pre-define a part of the music and then let the model infill the rest, similar to the task of masked music generation (or music inpainting). External control conditions the model with external yet related information, such as chord, texture, or other features, via the cross-attention mechanism. We show that by using internal and external controls, Polyffusion unifies a wide range of music creation tasks, including melody generation given accompaniment, accompaniment generation given melody, arbitrary music segment inpainting, and music arrangement given chords or textures. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms existing Transformer and sampling-based baselines, and using pre-trained disentangled representations as external conditions yields more effective controls.

HumTrans: A Novel Open-Source Dataset for Humming Melody Transcription and Beyond

This paper introduces the HumTrans dataset, which is publicly available and primarily designed for humming melody transcription. The dataset can also serve as a foundation for downstream tasks such as humming melody based music generation. It consists of 500 musical compositions of different genres and languages, with each composition divided into multiple segments. In total, the dataset comprises 1000 music segments. To collect this humming dataset, we employed 10 college students, all of whom are either music majors or proficient in playing at least one musical instrument. Each of them hummed every segment twice using the web recording interface provided by our designed website. The humming recordings were sampled at a frequency of 44,100 Hz. During the humming session, the main interface provides a musical score for students to reference, with the melody audio playing simultaneously to aid in capturing both melody and rhythm. The dataset encompasses approximately 56.22 hours of audio, making it the largest known humming dataset to date. The dataset will be released on Hugging Face, and we will provide a GitHub repository containing baseline results and evaluation codes.