Music source separation (MSS) aims to separate a music recording into multiple musically distinct stems, such as vocals, bass, drums, and more. Recently, deep learning approaches such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been used, but the improvement is still limited. In this paper, we propose a novel frequency-domain approach based on a Band-Split RoPE Transformer (called BS-RoFormer). BS-RoFormer relies on a band-split module to project the input complex spectrogram into subband-level representations, and then arranges a stack of hierarchical Transformers to model the inner-band as well as inter-band sequences for multi-band mask estimation. To facilitate training the model for MSS, we propose to use the Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE). The BS-RoFormer system trained on MUSDB18HQ and 500 extra songs ranked the first place in the MSS track of Sound Demixing Challenge (SDX23). Benchmarking a smaller version of BS-RoFormer on MUSDB18HQ, we achieve state-of-the-art result without extra training data, with 9.80 dB of average SDR.
Tablature notation is widely used in popular music to transcribe and share guitar musical content. As a complement to standard score notation, tablatures transcribe performance gesture information including finger positions and a variety of guitar-specific playing techniques such as slides, hammer-on/pull-off or bends.This paper focuses on bends, which enable to progressively shift the pitch of a note, therefore circumventing physical limitations of the discrete fretted fingerboard. In this paper, we propose a set of 25 high-level features, computed for each note of the tablature, to study how bend occurrences can be predicted from their past and future short-term context. Experiments are performed on a corpus of 932 lead guitar tablatures of popular music and show that a decision tree successfully predicts bend occurrences with an F1 score of 0.71 anda limited amount of false positive predictions, demonstrating promising applications to assist the arrangement of non-guitar music into guitar tablatures.
We develop aspects of music theory related to harmony, such as scales, chord formation and improvisation from a combinatorial perspective. The goal is to provide a foundation for this subject by deriving the basic structure from a few assumptions, rather than writing down long lists of chords/scales to memorize without an underlying principle. Our approach involves introducing constraints that limit the possible scales we can consider. For example, we may impose the constraint that two voices cannot be only a semitone apart as this is too dissonant. We can then study scales that do not contain notes that are a semitone apart. A more refined constraint avoids three voices colliding by studying scales that do not have three notes separated only by semitones. Additionally, we require that our scales are complete, which roughly means that they are the maximal sets of tones that satisfy these constraints. As it turns out, completeness as applied to these simple two/three voice constraints characterizes the types of scales that are commonly used in music composition. Surprisingly, there is a correspondence between scales subject to the two-voice constraint and those subject to the three-voice constraint. We formulate this correspondence as a duality statement that provides a way to understand scales subject to one type of constraint in terms of scales subject to the other. Finally, we combine these constraint ideas to provide a classification of chords.
Music generation has attracted growing interest with the advancement of deep generative models. However, generating music conditioned on textual descriptions, known as text-to-music, remains challenging due to the complexity of musical structures and high sampling rate requirements. Despite the task's significance, prevailing generative models exhibit limitations in music quality, computational efficiency, and generalization. This paper introduces JEN-1, a universal high-fidelity model for text-to-music generation. JEN-1 is a diffusion model incorporating both autoregressive and non-autoregressive training. Through in-context learning, JEN-1 performs various generation tasks including text-guided music generation, music inpainting, and continuation. Evaluations demonstrate JEN-1's superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in text-music alignment and music quality while maintaining computational efficiency. Our demos are available at http://futureverse.com/research/jen/demos/jen1
We introduce MMMU: a new benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal models on massive multi-discipline tasks demanding college-level subject knowledge and deliberate reasoning. MMMU includes 11.5K meticulously collected multimodal questions from college exams, quizzes, and textbooks, covering six core disciplines: Art & Design, Business, Science, Health & Medicine, Humanities & Social Science, and Tech & Engineering. These questions span 30 subjects and 183 subfields, comprising 30 highly heterogeneous image types, such as charts, diagrams, maps, tables, music sheets, and chemical structures. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMMU focuses on advanced perception and reasoning with domain-specific knowledge, challenging models to perform tasks akin to those faced by experts. Our evaluation of 14 open-source LMMs and the proprietary GPT-4V(ision) highlights the substantial challenges posed by MMMU. Even the advanced GPT-4V only achieves a 56% accuracy, indicating significant room for improvement. We believe MMMU will stimulate the community to build next-generation multimodal foundation models towards expert artificial general intelligence.
The rapidly evolving field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has generated significant interest in developing methods to make AI systems more transparent and understandable. However, the problem of explainability cannot be exhaustively solved in the abstract, as there is no single approach that can be universally applied to generate adequate explanations for any given AI system, and this is especially true in the arts. In this position paper, we propose an Explanatory Pragmatism (EP) framework for XAI in music performance, emphasising the importance of context and audience in the development of explainability requirements. By tailoring explanations to specific audiences and continuously refining them based on feedback, EP offers a promising direction for enhancing the transparency and interpretability of AI systems in broad artistic applications and more specifically to music performance.
Choral singing, a widely practiced form of ensemble singing, lacks comprehensive datasets in the realm of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research, due to challenges arising from the requirement to curate multitrack recordings. To address this, we devised a novel methodology, leveraging state-of-the-art synthesizers to create and curate quality renditions. The scores were sourced from Choral Public Domain Library(CPDL). This work is done in collaboration with a diverse team of musicians, software engineers and researchers. The resulting dataset, complete with its associated metadata, and methodology is released as part of this work, opening up new avenues for exploration and advancement in the field of singing voice research.
Autoregressive models based on Transformers have become the prevailing approach for generating music compositions that exhibit comprehensive musical structure. These models are typically trained by minimizing the negative log-likelihood (NLL) of the observed sequence in an autoregressive manner. However, when generating long sequences, the quality of samples from these models tends to significantly deteriorate due to exposure bias. To address this issue, we leverage classifiers trained to differentiate between real and sampled sequences to identify these failures. This observation motivates our exploration of adversarial losses as a complement to the NLL objective. We employ a pre-trained Span-BERT model as the discriminator in the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework, which enhances training stability in our experiments. To optimize discrete sequences within the GAN framework, we utilize the Gumbel-Softmax trick to obtain a differentiable approximation of the sampling process. Additionally, we partition the sequences into smaller chunks to ensure that memory constraints are met. Through human evaluations and the introduction of a novel discriminative metric, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms a baseline model trained solely on likelihood maximization.
We use Google's MusicVAE, a Variational Auto-Encoder with a 512-dimensional latent space to represent a few bars of music, and organize the latent dimensions according to their relevance in describing music. We find that, on average, most latent neurons remain silent when fed real music tracks: we call these "noise" neurons. The remaining few dozens of latent neurons that do fire are called "music neurons". We ask which neurons carry the musical information and what kind of musical information they encode, namely something that can be identified as pitch, rhythm or melody. We find that most of the information about pitch and rhythm is encoded in the first few music neurons: the neural network has thus constructed a couple of variables that non-linearly encode many human-defined variables used to describe pitch and rhythm. The concept of melody only seems to show up in independent neurons for longer sequences of music.
Music source separation (MSS) aims to extract 'vocals', 'drums', 'bass' and 'other' tracks from a piece of mixed music. While deep learning methods have shown impressive results, there is a trend toward larger models. In our paper, we introduce a novel and lightweight architecture called DTTNet, which is based on Dual-Path Module and Time-Frequency Convolutions Time-Distributed Fully-connected UNet (TFC-TDF UNet). DTTNet achieves 10.12 dB cSDR on 'vocals' compared to 10.01 dB reported for Bandsplit RNN (BSRNN) but with 86.7% fewer parameters. We also assess pattern-specific performance and model generalization for intricate audio patterns.