LaunchpadGPT: Language Model as Music Visualization Designer on Launchpad

Launchpad is a musical instrument that allows users to create and perform music by pressing illuminated buttons. To assist and inspire the design of the Launchpad light effect, and provide a more accessible approach for beginners to create music visualization with this instrument, we proposed the LaunchpadGPT model to generate music visualization designs on Launchpad automatically. Based on the language model with excellent generation ability, our proposed LaunchpadGPT takes an audio piece of music as input and outputs the lighting effects of Launchpad-playing in the form of a video (Launchpad-playing video). We collect Launchpad-playing videos and process them to obtain music and corresponding video frame of Launchpad-playing as prompt-completion pairs, to train the language model. The experiment result shows the proposed method can create better music visualization than random generation methods and hold the potential for a broader range of music visualization applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/yunlong10/LaunchpadGPT/.

Theme Transformer: Symbolic Music Generation with Theme-Conditioned Transformer

Attention-based Transformer models have been increasingly employed for automatic music generation. To condition the generation process of such a model with a user-specified sequence, a popular approach is to take that conditioning sequence as a priming sequence and ask a Transformer decoder to generate a continuation. However, this prompt-based conditioning cannot guarantee that the conditioning sequence would develop or even simply repeat itself in the generated continuation. In this paper, we propose an alternative conditioning approach, called theme-based conditioning, that explicitly trains the Transformer to treat the conditioning sequence as a thematic material that has to manifest itself multiple times in its generation result. This is achieved with two main technical contributions. First, we propose a deep learning-based approach that uses contrastive representation learning and clustering to automatically retrieve thematic materials from music pieces in the training data. Second, we propose a novel gated parallel attention module to be used in a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) encoder/decoder architecture to more effectively account for a given conditioning thematic material in the generation process of the Transformer decoder. We report on objective and subjective evaluations of variants of the proposed Theme Transformer and the conventional prompt-based baseline, showing that our best model can generate, to some extent, polyphonic pop piano music with repetition and plausible variations of a given condition.

Continuous descriptor-based control for deep audio synthesis

Despite significant advances in deep models for music generation, the use of these techniques remains restricted to expert users. Before being democratized among musicians, generative models must first provide expressive control over the generation, as this conditions the integration of deep generative models in creative workflows. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing a deep generative audio model providing expressive and continuous descriptor-based control, while remaining lightweight enough to be embedded in a hardware synthesizer. We enforce the controllability of real-time generation by explicitly removing salient musical features in the latent space using an adversarial confusion criterion. User-specified features are then reintroduced as additional conditioning information, allowing for continuous control of the generation, akin to a synthesizer knob. We assess the performance of our method on a wide variety of sounds including instrumental, percussive and speech recordings while providing both timbre and attributes transfer, allowing new ways of generating sounds.

TM2D: Bimodality Driven 3D Dance Generation via Music-Text Integration

We propose a novel task for generating 3D dance movements that simultaneously incorporate both text and music modalities. Unlike existing works that generate dance movements using a single modality such as music, our goal is to produce richer dance movements guided by the instructive information provided by the text. However, the lack of paired motion data with both music and text modalities limits the ability to generate dance movements that integrate both. To alleviate this challenge, we propose to utilize a 3D human motion VQ-VAE to project the motions of the two datasets into a latent space consisting of quantized vectors, which effectively mix the motion tokens from the two datasets with different distributions for training. Additionally, we propose a cross-modal transformer to integrate text instructions into motion generation architecture for generating 3D dance movements without degrading the performance of music-conditioned dance generation. To better evaluate the quality of the generated motion, we introduce two novel metrics, namely Motion Prediction Distance (MPD) and Freezing Score, to measure the coherence and freezing percentage of the generated motion. Extensive experiments show that our approach can generate realistic and coherent dance movements conditioned on both text and music while maintaining comparable performance with the two single modalities. Code will be available at: https://garfield-kh.github.io/TM2D/.

Dual-track Music Generation using Deep Learning

Music generation is always interesting in a sense that there is no formalized recipe. In this work, we propose a novel dual-track architecture for generating classical piano music, which is able to model the inter-dependency of left-hand and right-hand piano music. Particularly, we experimented with a lot of different models of neural network as well as different representations of music, and the results show that our proposed model outperforms all other tested methods. Besides, we deployed some special policies for model training and generation, which contributed to the model performance remarkably. Finally, under two evaluation methods, we compared our models with the MuseGAN project and true music.

MusicLM: Generating Music From Text

We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as "a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff". MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes. Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and adherence to the text description. Moreover, we demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption. To support future research, we publicly release MusicCaps, a dataset composed of 5.5k music-text pairs, with rich text descriptions provided by human experts.

Enhanced Memory Network: The novel network structure for Symbolic Music Generation

Symbolic melodies generation is one of the essential tasks for automatic music generation. Recently, models based on neural networks have had a significant influence on generating symbolic melodies. However, the musical context structure is complicated to capture through deep neural networks. Although long short-term memory (LSTM) is attempted to solve this problem through learning order dependence in the musical sequence, it is not capable of capturing musical context with only one note as input for each time step of LSTM. In this paper, we propose a novel Enhanced Memory Network (EMN) with several recurrent units, named Enhanced Memory Unit (EMU), to explicitly modify the internal architecture of LSTM for containing music beat information and reinforces the memory of the latest musical beat through aggregating beat inside the memory gate. In addition, to increase the diversity of generated musical notes, cosine distance among adjacent time steps of hidden states is considered as part of loss functions to avoid a high similarity score that harms the diversity of generated notes. Objective and subjective evaluation results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code and music demo are available at https://github.com/qrqrqrqr/EMU

An Order-Complexity Model for Aesthetic Quality Assessment of Symbolic Homophony Music Scores

Computational aesthetics evaluation has made great achievements in the field of visual arts, but the research work on music still needs to be explored. Although the existing work of music generation is very substantial, the quality of music score generated by AI is relatively poor compared with that created by human composers. The music scores created by AI are usually monotonous and devoid of emotion. Based on Birkhoff's aesthetic measure, this paper proposes an objective quantitative evaluation method for homophony music score aesthetic quality assessment. The main contributions of our work are as follows: first, we put forward a homophony music score aesthetic model to objectively evaluate the quality of music score as a baseline model; second, we put forward eight basic music features and four music aesthetic features.

Symbolic Music Loop Generation with Neural Discrete Representations

Since most of music has repetitive structures from motifs to phrases, repeating musical ideas can be a basic operation for music composition. The basic block that we focus on is conceptualized as loops which are essential ingredients of music. Furthermore, meaningful note patterns can be formed in a finite space, so it is sufficient to represent them with combinations of discrete symbols as done in other domains. In this work, we propose symbolic music loop generation via learning discrete representations. We first extract loops from MIDI datasets using a loop detector and then learn an autoregressive model trained by discrete latent codes of the extracted loops. We show that our model outperforms well-known music generative models in terms of both fidelity and diversity, evaluating on random space. Our code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/sjhan91/Loop_VQVAE_Official.

Symbolic Music Structure Analysis with Graph Representations and Changepoint Detection Methods

Music Structure Analysis is an open research task in Music Information Retrieval (MIR). In the past, there have been several works that attempt to segment music into the audio and symbolic domains, however, the identification and segmentation of the music structure at different levels is still an open research problem in this area. In this work we propose three methods, two of which are novel graph-based algorithms that aim to segment symbolic music by its form or structure: Norm, G-PELT and G-Window. We performed an ablation study with two public datasets that have different forms or structures in order to compare such methods varying their parameter values and comparing the performance against different music styles. We have found that encoding symbolic music with graph representations and computing the novelty of Adjacency Matrices obtained from graphs represent the structure of symbolic music pieces well without the need to extract features from it. We are able to detect the boundaries with an online unsupervised changepoint detection method with a F_1 of 0.5640 for a 1 bar tolerance in one of the public datasets that we used for testing our methods. We also provide the performance results of the algorithms at different levels of structure, high, medium and low, to show how the parameters of the proposed methods have to be adjusted depending on the level. We added the best performing method with its parameters for each structure level to musicaiz, an open source python package, to facilitate the reproducibility and usability of this work. We hope that this methods could be used to improve other MIR tasks such as music generation with structure, music classification or key changes detection.