A Review of Intelligent Music Generation Systems

Intelligent music generation, one of the most popular subfields of computer creativity, can lower the creative threshold for non-specialists and increase the efficiency of music creation. In the last five years, the quality of algorithm-based automatic music generation has increased significantly, motivated by the use of modern generative algorithms to learn the patterns implicit within a piece of music based on rule constraints or a musical corpus, thus generating music samples in various styles. Some of the available literature reviews lack a systematic benchmark of generative models and are traditional and conservative in their perspective, resulting in a vision of the future development of the field that is not deeply integrated with the current rapid scientific progress. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey and analysis of recent intelligent music generation techniques,provide a critical discussion, explicitly identify their respective characteristics, and present them in a general table. We first introduce how music as a stream of information is encoded and the relevant datasets, then compare different types of generation algorithms, summarize their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss existing methods for evaluation. Finally, the development of artificial intelligence in composition is studied, especially by comparing the different characteristics of music generation techniques in the East and West and analyzing the development prospects in this field.

Pied Piper: Meta Search for Music

Internet search engines have become an integral part of life, but for pop music, people still rely on textual search engines like Google. We propose Pied piper, a meta search engine for music. It can search for music lyrics, song metadata and song audio or a combination of any of these as the input query and efficiently return the relevant results.

Sparks of Large Audio Models: A Survey and Outlook

This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the recent advancements and challenges in applying large language models to the field of audio signal processing. Audio processing, with its diverse signal representations and a wide range of sources--from human voices to musical instruments and environmental sounds--poses challenges distinct from those found in traditional Natural Language Processing scenarios. Nevertheless, \textit{Large Audio Models}, epitomized by transformer-based architectures, have shown marked efficacy in this sphere. By leveraging massive amount of data, these models have demonstrated prowess in a variety of audio tasks, spanning from Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech to Music Generation, among others. Notably, recently these Foundational Audio Models, like SeamlessM4T, have started showing abilities to act as universal translators, supporting multiple speech tasks for up to 100 languages without any reliance on separate task-specific systems. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art methodologies regarding \textit{Foundational Large Audio Models}, their performance benchmarks, and their applicability to real-world scenarios. We also highlight current limitations and provide insights into potential future research directions in the realm of \textit{Large Audio Models} with the intent to spark further discussion, thereby fostering innovation in the next generation of audio-processing systems. Furthermore, to cope with the rapid development in this area, we will consistently update the relevant repository with relevant recent articles and their open-source implementations at https://github.com/EmulationAI/awesome-large-audio-models.

Affective Idiosyncratic Responses to Music

Affective responses to music are highly personal. Despite consensus that idiosyncratic factors play a key role in regulating how listeners emotionally respond to music, precisely measuring the marginal effects of these variables has proved challenging. To address this gap, we develop computational methods to measure affective responses to music from over 403M listener comments on a Chinese social music platform. Building on studies from music psychology in systematic and quasi-causal analyses, we test for musical, lyrical, contextual, demographic, and mental health effects that drive listener affective responses. Finally, motivated by the social phenomenon known as w\v{a}ng-y\`i-y\'un, we identify influencing factors of platform user self-disclosures, the social support they receive, and notable differences in discloser user activity.

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.

Generating music with sentiment using Transformer-GANs

The field of Automatic Music Generation has seen significant progress thanks to the advent of Deep Learning. However, most of these results have been produced by unconditional models, which lack the ability to interact with their users, not allowing them to guide the generative process in meaningful and practical ways. Moreover, synthesizing music that remains coherent across longer timescales while still capturing the local aspects that make it sound ``realistic'' or ``human-like'' is still challenging. This is due to the large computational requirements needed to work with long sequences of data, and also to limitations imposed by the training schemes that are often employed. In this paper, we propose a generative model of symbolic music conditioned by data retrieved from human sentiment. The model is a Transformer-GAN trained with labels that correspond to different configurations of the valence and arousal dimensions that quantitatively represent human affective states. We try to tackle both of the problems above by employing an efficient linear version of Attention and using a Discriminator both as a tool to improve the overall quality of the generated music and its ability to follow the conditioning signals.

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.

Multi-Modality in Music: Predicting Emotion in Music from High-Level Audio Features and Lyrics

This paper aims to test whether a multi-modal approach for music emotion recognition (MER) performs better than a uni-modal one on high-level song features and lyrics. We use 11 song features retrieved from the Spotify API, combined lyrics features including sentiment, TF-IDF, and Anew to predict valence and arousal (Russell, 1980) scores on the Deezer Mood Detection Dataset (DMDD) (Delbouys et al., 2018) with 4 different regression models. We find that out of the 11 high-level song features, mainly 5 contribute to the performance, multi-modal features do better than audio alone when predicting valence. We made our code publically available.

GTR-CTRL: Instrument and Genre Conditioning for Guitar-Focused Music Generation with Transformers

Recently, symbolic music generation with deep learning techniques has witnessed steady improvements. Most works on this topic focus on MIDI representations, but less attention has been paid to symbolic music generation using guitar tablatures (tabs) which can be used to encode multiple instruments. Tabs include information on expressive techniques and fingerings for fretted string instruments in addition to rhythm and pitch. In this work, we use the DadaGP dataset for guitar tab music generation, a corpus of over 26k songs in GuitarPro and token formats. We introduce methods to condition a Transformer-XL deep learning model to generate guitar tabs (GTR-CTRL) based on desired instrumentation (inst-CTRL) and genre (genre-CTRL). Special control tokens are appended at the beginning of each song in the training corpus. We assess the performance of the model with and without conditioning. We propose instrument presence metrics to assess the inst-CTRL model's response to a given instrumentation prompt. We trained a BERT model for downstream genre classification and used it to assess the results obtained with the genre-CTRL model. Statistical analyses evidence significant differences between the conditioned and unconditioned models. Overall, results indicate that the GTR-CTRL methods provide more flexibility and control for guitar-focused symbolic music generation than an unconditioned model.