Daily Papers

Symbolic music datasets are important for music information retrieval and musical analysis. However, there is a lack of large-scale symbolic datasets for classical piano music. In this article, we create a GiantMIDI-Piano (GP) dataset containing 38,700,838 transcribed notes and 10,855 unique solo piano works composed by 2,786 composers. We extract the names of music works and the names of composers from the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP). We search and download their corresponding audio recordings from the internet. We further create a curated subset containing 7,236 works composed by 1,787 composers by constraining the titles of downloaded audio recordings containing the surnames of composers. We apply a convolutional neural network to detect solo piano works. Then, we transcribe those solo piano recordings into Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) files using a high-resolution piano transcription system. Each transcribed MIDI file contains the onset, offset, pitch, and velocity attributes of piano notes and pedals. GiantMIDI-Piano includes 90% live performance MIDI files and 10\% sequence input MIDI files. We analyse the statistics of GiantMIDI-Piano and show pitch class, interval, trichord, and tetrachord frequencies of six composers from different eras to show that GiantMIDI-Piano can be used for musical analysis. We evaluate the quality of GiantMIDI-Piano in terms of solo piano detection F1 scores, metadata accuracy, and transcription error rates. We release the source code for acquiring the GiantMIDI-Piano dataset at https://github.com/bytedance/GiantMIDI-Piano

We present FiloBass: a novel corpus of music scores and annotations which focuses on the important but often overlooked role of the double bass in jazz accompaniment. Inspired by recent work that sheds light on the role of the soloist, we offer a collection of 48 manually verified transcriptions of professional jazz bassists, comprising over 50,000 note events, which are based on the backing tracks used in the FiloSax dataset. For each recording we provide audio stems, scores, performance-aligned MIDI and associated metadata for beats, downbeats, chord symbols and markers for musical form. We then use FiloBass to enrich our understanding of jazz bass lines, by conducting a corpus-based musical analysis with a contrastive study of existing instructional methods. Together with the original FiloSax dataset, our work represents a significant step toward a fully annotated performance dataset for a jazz quartet setting. By illuminating the critical role of the bass in jazz, this work contributes to a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the genre.

Cue points indicate possible temporal boundaries in a transition between two pieces of music in DJ mixing and constitute a crucial element in autonomous DJ systems as well as for live mixing. In this work, we present a novel method for automatic cue point estimation, interpreted as a computer vision object detection task. Our proposed system is based on a pre-trained object detection transformer which we fine-tune on our novel cue point dataset. Our provided dataset contains 21k manually annotated cue points from human experts as well as metronome information for nearly 5k individual tracks, making this dataset 35x larger than the previously available cue point dataset. Unlike previous methods, our approach does not require low-level musical information analysis, while demonstrating increased precision in retrieving cue point positions. Moreover, our proposed method demonstrates high adherence to phrasing, a type of high-level music structure commonly emphasized in electronic dance music. The code, model checkpoints, and dataset are made publicly available.

Estimating piano dynamic from audio recordings is a fundamental challenge in computational music analysis. In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-task network that jointly predicts dynamic levels, change points, beats, and downbeats from a shared latent representation. These four targets form the metrical structure of dynamics in the music score. Inspired by recent vocal dynamic research, we use a multi-scale network as the backbone, which takes Bark-scale specific loudness as the input feature. Compared to log-Mel as input, this reduces model size from 14.7 M to 0.5 M, enabling long sequential input. We use a 60-second audio length in audio segmentation, which doubled the length of beat tracking commonly used. Evaluated on the public MazurkaBL dataset, our model achieves state-of-the-art results across all tasks. This work sets a new benchmark for piano dynamic estimation and delivers a powerful and compact tool, paving the way for large-scale, resource-efficient analysis of musical expression.

This paper approaches the problem of separating the notes from a quantized symbolic music piece (e.g., a MIDI file) into multiple voices and staves. This is a fundamental part of the larger task of music score engraving (or score typesetting), which aims to produce readable musical scores for human performers. We focus on piano music and support homophonic voices, i.e., voices that can contain chords, and cross-staff voices, which are notably difficult tasks that have often been overlooked in previous research. We propose an end-to-end system based on graph neural networks that clusters notes that belong to the same chord and connects them with edges if they are part of a voice. Our results show clear and consistent improvements over a previous approach on two datasets of different styles. To aid the qualitative analysis of our results, we support the export in symbolic music formats and provide a direct visualization of our outputs graph over the musical score. All code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/CPJKU/piano_svsep

Automated piano performance evaluation traditionally relies on symbolic (MIDI) representations, which capture note-level information but miss the acoustic nuances that characterize expressive playing. I propose using pre-trained audio foundation models, specifically MuQ and MERT, to predict 19 perceptual dimensions of piano performance quality. Using synthesized audio from PercePiano MIDI files (rendered via Pianoteq), I compare audio and symbolic approaches under controlled conditions where both derive from identical source data. The best model, MuQ layers 9-12 with Pianoteq soundfont augmentation, achieves R^2 = 0.537 (95% CI: [0.465, 0.575]), representing a 55% improvement over the symbolic baseline (R^2 = 0.347). Statistical analysis confirms significance (p < 10^-25) with audio outperforming symbolic on all 19 dimensions. I validate the approach through cross-soundfont generalization (R^2 = 0.534 +/- 0.075), difficulty correlation with an external dataset (rho = 0.623), and multi-performer consistency analysis. Analysis of audio-symbolic fusion reveals high error correlation (r = 0.738), explaining why fusion provides minimal benefit: audio representations alone are sufficient. I release the complete training pipeline, pretrained models, and inference code.

Recent years have seen a boom in computational approaches to music analysis, yet each one is typically tailored to a specific analytical domain. In this work, we introduce AnalysisGNN, a novel graph neural network framework that leverages a data-shuffling strategy with a custom weighted multi-task loss and logit fusion between task-specific classifiers to integrate heterogeneously annotated symbolic datasets for comprehensive score analysis. We further integrate a Non-Chord-Tone prediction module, which identifies and excludes passing and non-functional notes from all tasks, thereby improving the consistency of label signals. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that AnalysisGNN achieves performance comparable to traditional static-dataset approaches, while showing increased resilience to domain shifts and annotation inconsistencies across multiple heterogeneous corpora.

The aim of this work is to define a model based on deep learning that is able to identify different instrument timbres with as few parameters as possible. For this purpose, we have worked with classical orchestral instruments played with different dynamics, which are part of a few instrument families and which play notes in the same pitch range. It has been possible to assess the ability to classify instruments by timbre even if the instruments are playing the same note with the same intensity. The network employed uses a multi-head attention mechanism, with 8 heads and a dense network at the output taking as input the log-mel magnitude spectrograms of the sound samples. This network allows the identification of 20 instrument classes of the classical orchestra, achieving an overall F_1 value of 0.62. An analysis of the weights of the attention layer has been performed and the confusion matrix of the model is presented, allowing us to assess the ability of the proposed architecture to distinguish timbre and to establish the aspects on which future work should focus.

Music understanding is a complex task that often requires reasoning over both structural and semantic elements of audio. We introduce BASS, designed to evaluate music understanding and reasoning in audio language models across four broad categories: structural segmentation, lyric transcription, musicological analysis, and artist collaboration. BASS comprises 2658 questions spanning 12 tasks, 1993 unique songs and covering over 138 hours of music from a wide range of genres and tracks, crafted to assess musicological knowledge and reasoning in real-world scenarios. We evaluate 14 open-source and frontier multimodal LMs, finding that even state-of-the-art models struggle on higher-level reasoning tasks such as structural segmentation and artist collaboration, while performing best on lyric transcription. Our analysis reveals that current models leverage linguistic priors effectively but remain limited in reasoning over musical structure, vocal, and musicological attributes. BASS provides an evaluation framework with widespread applications in music recommendation and search and has the potential to guide the development of audio LMs.

We present DEMON, a real-time diffusion engine that makes the denoising process playable as a live musical instrument: a control surface both broad (many parameters shaped per-frame across the output) and responsive (each control taking effect as fast as its place in the denoising loop allows). Built on ACE-Step 1.5 and StreamDiffusion's ring-buffer architecture with TensorRT acceleration, it sustains up to 12.3 decoder completions per second for 60-second music on a single consumer GPU (RTX 5090), or 11.3 generations per second at our production ring-depth of 4. At these rates denoising parameters become viable as live performance controls, but the ring buffer propagates per-request changes only at its drain rate, a floor of S denoising steps. We contribute four mechanisms. (1) Per-slot heterogeneous denoise scheduling: each ring-buffer slot owns its timestep schedule, so a moving denoise slider is tracked without wiping the in-flight queue, where the upstream global-schedule design must rebuild and discard it. (2) Shared mutable per-step state, giving any parameter consulted at every solver step next-tick effect, bypassing ring-buffer drain. (3) Per-frame source blending: a sampling-time control on the standard SDE re-noise step, giving a framewise transformation-strength axis that complements scalar denoise scheduling. (4) Windowed VAE decode exploiting receptive-field analysis for an 8.0x decode speedup. Together these separate streaming-diffusion parameters into four propagation classes, by onset and convergence latency.

A DJ mix is a sequence of music tracks concatenated seamlessly, typically rendered for audiences in a live setting by a DJ on stage. As a DJ mix is produced in a studio or the live version is recorded for music streaming services, computational methods to analyze DJ mixes, for example, extracting track information or understanding DJ techniques, have drawn research interests. Many of previous works are, however, limited to identifying individual tracks in a mix or segmenting it, and the sizes of the datasets are usually small. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of DJ music by aligning a mix to its original music tracks. We set up the subsequence alignment such that the audio features are less sensitive to the tempo or key change of the original track in a mix. This approach provides temporally tight mix-to-track matching from which we can obtain cue-points, transition length, mix segmentation, and musical changes in DJ performance. Using 1,557 mixes from 1001Tracklists including 13,728 tracks and 20,765 transitions, we conduct the proposed analysis and show a wide range of statistics, which may elucidate the creative process of DJ music making.

We introduce materiomusic as a generative framework linking the hierarchical structures of matter with the compositional logic of music. Across proteins, spider webs and flame dynamics, vibrational and architectural principles recur as tonal hierarchies, harmonic progressions, and long-range musical form. Using reversible mappings, from molecular spectra to musical tones and from three-dimensional networks to playable instruments, we show how sound functions as a scientific probe, an epistemic inversion where listening becomes a mode of seeing and musical composition becomes a blueprint for matter. These mappings excavate deep time: patterns originating in femtosecond molecular vibrations or billion-year evolutionary histories become audible. We posit that novelty in science and art emerges when constraints cannot be satisfied within existing degrees of freedom, forcing expansion of the space of viable configurations. Selective imperfection provides the mechanism restoring balance between coherence and adaptability. Quantitative support comes from exhaustive enumeration of all 2^12 musical scales, revealing that culturally significant systems cluster in a mid-entropy, mid-defect corridor, directly paralleling the Hall-Petch optimum where intermediate defect densities maximize material strength. Iterating these mappings creates productive collisions between human creativity and physics, generating new information as musical structures encounter evolutionary constraints. We show how swarm-based AI models compose music exhibiting human-like structural signatures such as small-world connectivity, modular integration, long-range coherence, suggesting a route beyond interpolation toward invention. We show that science and art are generative acts of world-building under constraint, with vibration as a shared grammar organizing structure across scales.

Autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating high-fidelity music. However, the conventional next-token prediction paradigm in AR models does not align with the human creative process in music composition, potentially compromising the musicality of generated samples. To overcome this limitation, we introduce MusiCoT, a novel chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting technique tailored for music generation. MusiCoT empowers the AR model to first outline an overall music structure before generating audio tokens, thereby enhancing the coherence and creativity of the resulting compositions. By leveraging the contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) model, we establish a chain of "musical thoughts", making MusiCoT scalable and independent of human-labeled data, in contrast to conventional CoT methods. Moreover, MusiCoT allows for in-depth analysis of music structure, such as instrumental arrangements, and supports music referencing -- accepting variable-length audio inputs as optional style references. This innovative approach effectively addresses copying issues, positioning MusiCoT as a vital practical method for music prompting. Our experimental results indicate that MusiCoT consistently achieves superior performance across both objective and subjective metrics, producing music quality that rivals state-of-the-art generation models. Our samples are available at https://MusiCoT.github.io/.

This research investigates the area of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and Music Emotion Recognition (MER) in relation to Sinhala songs, an underexplored field in music studies. The purpose of this study is to analyze the behavior of Sinhala comments on YouTube Sinhala song videos using social media comments as primary data sources. These included comments from 27 YouTube videos containing 20 different Sinhala songs, which were carefully selected so that strict linguistic reliability would be maintained and relevancy ensured. This process led to a total of 93,116 comments being gathered upon which the dataset was refined further by advanced filtering methods and transliteration mechanisms resulting into 63,471 Sinhala comments. Additionally, 964 stop-words specific for the Sinhala language were algorithmically derived out of which 182 matched exactly with English stop-words from NLTK corpus once translated. Also, comparisons were made between general domain corpora in Sinhala against the YouTube Comment Corpus in Sinhala confirming latter as good representation of general domain. The meticulously curated data set as well as the derived stop-words form important resources for future research in the fields of MIR and MER, since they could be used and demonstrate that there are possibilities with computational techniques to solve complex musical experiences across varied cultural traditions

In this paper, we learn disentangled representations of timbre and pitch for musical instrument sounds. We adapt a framework based on variational autoencoders with Gaussian mixture latent distributions. Specifically, we use two separate encoders to learn distinct latent spaces for timbre and pitch, which form Gaussian mixture components representing instrument identity and pitch, respectively. For reconstruction, latent variables of timbre and pitch are sampled from corresponding mixture components, and are concatenated as the input to a decoder. We show the model efficacy by latent space visualization, and a quantitative analysis indicates the discriminability of these spaces, even with a limited number of instrument labels for training. The model allows for controllable synthesis of selected instrument sounds by sampling from the latent spaces. To evaluate this, we trained instrument and pitch classifiers using original labeled data. These classifiers achieve high accuracy when tested on our synthesized sounds, which verifies the model performance of controllable realistic timbre and pitch synthesis. Our model also enables timbre transfer between multiple instruments, with a single autoencoder architecture, which is evaluated by measuring the shift in posterior of instrument classification. Our in depth evaluation confirms the model ability to successfully disentangle timbre and pitch.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) for music generation is undergoing rapid developments, with recent symbolic models leveraging sophisticated deep learning and diffusion model algorithms. One drawback with existing models is that they lack structural cohesion, particularly on harmonic-melodic structure. Furthermore, such existing models are largely "black-box" in nature and are not musically interpretable. This paper addresses these limitations via a novel generative music framework that incorporates concepts of Schenkerian analysis (SchA) in concert with a diffusion modeling framework. This framework, which we call ProGress (Prolongation-enhanced DiGress), adapts state-of-the-art deep models for discrete diffusion (in particular, the DiGress model of Vignac et al., 2023) for interpretable and structured music generation. Concretely, our contributions include 1) novel adaptations of the DiGress model for music generation, 2) a novel SchA-inspired phrase fusion methodology, and 3) a framework allowing users to control various aspects of the generation process to create coherent musical compositions. Results from human experiments suggest superior performance to existing state-of-the-art methods.

This study introduces RUMAA, a transformer-based framework for music performance analysis that unifies score-to-performance alignment, score-informed transcription, and mistake detection in a near end-to-end manner. Unlike prior methods addressing these tasks separately, RUMAA integrates them using pre-trained score and audio encoders and a novel tri-stream decoder capturing task interdependencies through proxy tasks. It aligns human-readable MusicXML scores with repeat symbols to full-length performance audio, overcoming traditional MIDI-based methods that rely on manually unfolded score-MIDI data with pre-specified repeat structures. RUMAA matches state-of-the-art alignment methods on non-repeated scores and outperforms them on scores with repeats in a public piano music dataset, while also delivering promising transcription and mistake detection results.

A conversational music retrieval system can help users discover music that matches their preferences through dialogue. To achieve this, a conversational music retrieval system should seamlessly engage in multi-turn conversation by 1) understanding user queries and 2) responding with natural language and retrieved music. A straightforward solution would be a data-driven approach utilizing such conversation logs. However, few datasets are available for the research and are limited in terms of volume and quality. In this paper, we present a data generation framework for rich music discovery dialogue using a large language model (LLM) and user intents, system actions, and musical attributes. This is done by i) dialogue intent analysis using grounded theory, ii) generating attribute sequences via cascading database filtering, and iii) generating utterances using large language models. By applying this framework to the Million Song dataset, we create LP-MusicDialog, a Large Language Model based Pseudo Music Dialogue dataset, containing over 288k music conversations using more than 319k music items. Our evaluation shows that the synthetic dataset is competitive with an existing, small human dialogue dataset in terms of dialogue consistency, item relevance, and naturalness. Furthermore, using the dataset, we train a conversational music retrieval model and show promising results.

Music scores are written representations of music and contain rich information about musical components. The visual information on music scores includes notes, rests, staff lines, clefs, dynamics, and articulations. This visual information in music scores contains more semantic information than audio and symbolic representations of music. Previous music score datasets have limited sizes and are mainly designed for optical music recognition (OMR). There is a lack of research on creating a large-scale benchmark dataset for music modeling and generation. In this work, we propose MusicScore, a large-scale music score dataset collected and processed from the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP). MusicScore consists of image-text pairs, where the image is a page of a music score and the text is the metadata of the music. The metadata of MusicScore is extracted from the general information section of the IMSLP pages. The metadata includes rich information about the composer, instrument, piece style, and genre of the music pieces. MusicScore is curated into small, medium, and large scales of 400, 14k, and 200k image-text pairs with varying diversity, respectively. We build a score generation system based on a UNet diffusion model to generate visually readable music scores conditioned on text descriptions to benchmark the MusicScore dataset for music score generation. MusicScore is released to the public at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ZheqiDAI/MusicScore.

This paper presents the Jazz Transformer, a generative model that utilizes a neural sequence model called the Transformer-XL for modeling lead sheets of Jazz music. Moreover, the model endeavors to incorporate structural events present in the Weimar Jazz Database (WJazzD) for inducing structures in the generated music. While we are able to reduce the training loss to a low value, our listening test suggests however a clear gap between the average ratings of the generated and real compositions. We therefore go one step further and conduct a series of computational analysis of the generated compositions from different perspectives. This includes analyzing the statistics of the pitch class, grooving, and chord progression, assessing the structureness of the music with the help of the fitness scape plot, and evaluating the model's understanding of Jazz music through a MIREX-like continuation prediction task. Our work presents in an analytical manner why machine-generated music to date still falls short of the artwork of humanity, and sets some goals for future work on automatic composition to further pursue.

Music Emotion Recognition involves the automatic identification of emotional elements within music tracks, and it has garnered significant attention due to its broad applicability in the field of Music Information Retrieval. It can also be used as the upstream task of many other human-related tasks such as emotional music generation and music recommendation. Due to existing psychology research, music emotion is determined by multiple factors such as the Timbre, Velocity, and Structure of the music. Incorporating multiple factors in MER helps achieve more interpretable and finer-grained methods. However, most prior works were uni-domain and showed weak consistency between arousal modeling performance and valence modeling performance. Based on this background, we designed a multi-domain emotion modeling method for instrumental music that combines symbolic analysis and acoustic analysis. At the same time, because of the rarity of music data and the difficulty of labeling, our multi-domain approach can make full use of limited data. Our approach was implemented and assessed using the publicly available piano dataset EMOPIA, resulting in a notable improvement over our baseline model with a 2.4% increase in overall accuracy, establishing its state-of-the-art performance.

Symbolic music datasets with matched scores and performances are essential for many music information retrieval (MIR) tasks. Yet, existing resources often cover a narrow range of composers, lack performance variety, omit note-level alignments, or use inconsistent naming formats. This work presents PianoCoRe, a large-scale piano MIDI dataset that unifies and refines major open-source piano corpora. The dataset contains 250,046 performances of 5,625 pieces written by 483 composers, totaling 21,763 h of performed music. PianoCoRe is released in tiered subsets to support different applications: from large-scale analysis and pre-training (PianoCoRe-C and deduplicated PianoCoRe-B) to expressive performance modeling with note-level score alignment (PianoCoRe-A/A*). The note-aligned subset, PianoCoRe-A, provides the largest open-source collection of 157,207 performances aligned to 1,591 scores to date. In addition to the dataset, the contributions are: (1) a MIDI quality classifier for detecting corrupted and score-like transcriptions and (2) RAScoP, an alignment refinement pipeline that cleans temporal alignment errors and interpolates missing notes. The analysis shows that the refinement reduces temporal noise and eliminates tempo outliers. Moreover, an expressive performance rendering model trained on PianoCoRe demonstrates improved robustness to unseen pieces compared to models trained on raw or smaller datasets. PianoCoRe provides a ready-to-use foundation for the next generation of expressive piano performance research.

In this paper, we introduce Jointist, an instrument-aware multi-instrument framework that is capable of transcribing, recognizing, and separating multiple musical instruments from an audio clip. Jointist consists of the instrument recognition module that conditions the other modules: the transcription module that outputs instrument-specific piano rolls, and the source separation module that utilizes instrument information and transcription results. The instrument conditioning is designed for an explicit multi-instrument functionality while the connection between the transcription and source separation modules is for better transcription performance. Our challenging problem formulation makes the model highly useful in the real world given that modern popular music typically consists of multiple instruments. However, its novelty necessitates a new perspective on how to evaluate such a model. During the experiment, we assess the model from various aspects, providing a new evaluation perspective for multi-instrument transcription. We also argue that transcription models can be utilized as a preprocessing module for other music analysis tasks. In the experiment on several downstream tasks, the symbolic representation provided by our transcription model turned out to be helpful to spectrograms in solving downbeat detection, chord recognition, and key estimation.

Guitar tablature transcription consists in deducing the string and the fret number on which each note should be played to reproduce the actual musical part. This assignment should lead to playable string-fret combinations throughout the entire track and, in general, preserve parsimonious motion between successive combinations. Throughout the history of guitar playing, specific chord fingerings have been developed across different musical styles that facilitate common idiomatic voicing combinations and motion between them. This paper presents a method for assigning guitar tablature notation to a given MIDI-based musical part (possibly consisting of multiple polyphonic tracks), i.e. no information about guitar-idiomatic expressional characteristics is involved (e.g. bending etc.) The current strategy is based on machine learning and requires a basic assumption about how much fingers can stretch on a fretboard; only standard 6-string guitar tuning is examined. The proposed method also examines the transcription of music pieces that was not meant to be played or could not possibly be played by a guitar (e.g. potentially a symphonic orchestra part), employing a rudimentary method for augmenting musical information and training/testing the system with artificial data. The results present interesting aspects about what the system can achieve when trained on the initial and augmented dataset, showing that the training with augmented data improves the performance even in simple, e.g. monophonic, cases. Results also indicate weaknesses and lead to useful conclusions about possible improvements.

In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey of AI music generation tools, including both research projects and commercialized applications. To conduct our analysis, we classified music generation approaches into three categories: parameter-based, text-based, and visual-based classes. Our survey highlights the diverse possibilities and functional features of these tools, which cater to a wide range of users, from regular listeners to professional musicians. We observed that each tool has its own set of advantages and limitations. As a result, we have compiled a comprehensive list of these factors that should be considered during the tool selection process. Moreover, our survey offers critical insights into the underlying mechanisms and challenges of AI music generation.

Even with strong sequence models like Transformers, generating expressive piano performances with long-range musical structures remains challenging. Meanwhile, methods to compose well-structured melodies or lead sheets (melody + chords), i.e., simpler forms of music, gained more success. Observing the above, we devise a two-stage Transformer-based framework that Composes a lead sheet first, and then Embellishes it with accompaniment and expressive touches. Such a factorization also enables pretraining on non-piano data. Our objective and subjective experiments show that Compose & Embellish shrinks the gap in structureness between a current state of the art and real performances by half, and improves other musical aspects such as richness and coherence as well.

Music arrangement generation is a subtask of automatic music generation, which involves reconstructing and re-conceptualizing a piece with new compositional techniques. Such a generation process inevitably requires reference from the original melody, chord progression, or other structural information. Despite some promising models for arrangement, they lack more refined data to achieve better evaluations and more practical results. In this paper, we propose POP909, a dataset which contains multiple versions of the piano arrangements of 909 popular songs created by professional musicians. The main body of the dataset contains the vocal melody, the lead instrument melody, and the piano accompaniment for each song in MIDI format, which are aligned to the original audio files. Furthermore, we provide the annotations of tempo, beat, key, and chords, where the tempo curves are hand-labeled and others are done by MIR algorithms. Finally, we conduct several baseline experiments with this dataset using standard deep music generation algorithms.

Inferring music time structures has a broad range of applications in music production, processing and analysis. Scholars have proposed various methods to analyze different aspects of time structures, such as beat, downbeat, tempo and meter. Many state-of-the-art (SOFA) methods, however, are computationally expensive. This makes them inapplicable in real-world industrial settings where the scale of the music collections can be millions. This paper proposes a new state space and a semi-Markov model for music time structure analysis. The proposed approach turns the commonly used 2D state spaces into a 1D model through a jump-back reward strategy. It reduces the state spaces size drastically. We then utilize the proposed method for causal, joint beat, downbeat, tempo, and meter tracking, and compare it against several previous methods. The proposed method delivers similar performance with the SOFA joint causal models with a much smaller state space and a more than 30 times speedup.

Music foundation models possess impressive music generation capabilities. When people compose music, they may infuse their understanding of music into their work, by using notes and intervals to craft melodies, chords to build progressions, and tempo to create a rhythmic feel. To what extent is this true of music generation models? More specifically, are fundamental Western music theory concepts observable within the "inner workings" of these models? Recent work proposed leveraging latent audio representations from music generation models towards music information retrieval tasks (e.g. genre classification, emotion recognition), which suggests that high-level musical characteristics are encoded within these models. However, probing individual music theory concepts (e.g. tempo, pitch class, chord quality) remains under-explored. Thus, we introduce SynTheory, a synthetic MIDI and audio music theory dataset, consisting of tempos, time signatures, notes, intervals, scales, chords, and chord progressions concepts. We then propose a framework to probe for these music theory concepts in music foundation models (Jukebox and MusicGen) and assess how strongly they encode these concepts within their internal representations. Our findings suggest that music theory concepts are discernible within foundation models and that the degree to which they are detectable varies by model size and layer.

Despite progress in controllable symbolic music generation, data scarcity remains a challenge for certain control modalities. Composer-style music generation is a prime example, as only a few pieces per composer are available, limiting the modeling of both styles and fundamental music elements (e.g., melody, chord, rhythm). In this paper, we investigate how general music knowledge learned from a broad corpus can enhance the mastery of specific composer styles, with a focus on piano piece generation. Our approach follows a two-stage training paradigm. First, we pre-train a REMI-based music generation model on a large corpus of pop, folk, and classical music. Then, we fine-tune it on a small, human-verified dataset from four renowned composers, namely Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, using a lightweight adapter module to condition the model on style indicators. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct both objective and subjective evaluations on style accuracy and musicality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms ablations and baselines, achieving more precise composer-style modeling and better musical aesthetics. Additionally, we provide observations on how the model builds music concepts from the generality pre-training and refines its stylistic understanding through the mastery fine-tuning.

Developing text-driven symbolic music generation models remains challenging due to the scarcity of aligned text-music datasets and the unreliability of automated captioning pipelines. While most efforts have focused on MIDI, sheet music representations are largely underexplored in text-driven generation. We present Text2Score, a two-stage framework comprising a planning stage and an execution stage for generating sheet music from natural language prompts. By deriving supervision signals directly from symbolic XML data, we propose an alternative training paradigm that bypasses noisy or scarce text-music pairs. In the planning stage, an LLM orchestrator translates a natural language prompt into a structured measure-wise plan defining musical attributes such as instruments, key, time signatures, harmony, etc. This plan is then consumed by a generative model in the execution stage to produce interleaved ABC notation conditioned on the plan's structural constraints. To assess output quality, we introduce an evaluation framework covering playability, readability, instrument utilization, structural complexity, and prompt adherence, validated by expert musicians. Text2Score consistently outperforms both a pure LLM-based agentic framework and three end-to-end baselines across objective and subjective dimensions. We open-source the dataset, code, evaluation set and LLM prompts used in this work; a demo is available on our project page (https://keshavbhandari.github.io/portfolio/text2score).

Generative models guided by text prompts are increasingly becoming more popular. However, no text-to-MIDI models currently exist, mostly due to the lack of a captioned MIDI dataset. This work aims to enable research that combines LLMs with symbolic music by presenting the first large-scale MIDI dataset with text captions that is openly available: MidiCaps. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files are a widely used format for encoding musical information. Their structured format captures the nuances of musical composition and has practical applications by music producers, composers, musicologists, as well as performers. Inspired by recent advancements in captioning techniques applied to various domains, we present a large-scale curated dataset of over 168k MIDI files accompanied by textual descriptions. Each MIDI caption succinctly describes the musical content, encompassing tempo, chord progression, time signature, instruments present, genre and mood; thereby facilitating multi-modal exploration and analysis. The dataset contains a mix of various genres, styles, and complexities, offering a rich source for training and evaluating models for tasks such as music information retrieval, music understanding and cross-modal translation. We provide detailed statistics about the dataset and have assessed the quality of the captions in an extensive listening study. We anticipate that this resource will stimulate further research in the intersection of music and natural language processing, fostering advancements in both fields.

We propose a transformer-based rhythm quantization model that incorporates beat and downbeat information to quantize MIDI performances into metrically-aligned, human-readable scores. We propose a beat-based preprocessing method that transfers score and performance data into a unified token representation. We optimize our model architecture and data representation and train on piano and guitar performances. Our model exceeds state-of-the-art performance based on the MUSTER metric.

This paper introduces an extendable modular system that compiles a range of music feature extraction models to aid music information retrieval research. The features include musical elements like key, downbeats, and genre, as well as audio characteristics like instrument recognition, vocals/instrumental classification, and vocals gender detection. The integrated models are state-of-the-art or latest open-source. The features can be extracted as latent or post-processed labels, enabling integration into music applications such as generative music, recommendation, and playlist generation. The modular design allows easy integration of newly developed systems, making it a good benchmarking and comparison tool. This versatile toolkit supports the research community in developing innovative solutions by providing concrete musical features.

In this paper, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the pre-training of music. While the prevalent use of MIDI in music modeling is well-established, our findings suggest that LLMs are inherently more compatible with ABC Notation, which aligns more closely with their design and strengths, thereby enhancing the model's performance in musical composition. To address the challenges associated with misaligned measures from different tracks during generation, we propose the development of a Synchronized Multi-Track ABC Notation (SMT-ABC Notation), which aims to preserve coherence across multiple musical tracks. Our contributions include a series of models capable of handling up to 8192 tokens, covering 90\% of the symbolic music data in our training set. Furthermore, we explore the implications of the Symbolic Music Scaling Law (SMS Law) on model performance. The results indicate a promising direction for future research in music generation, offering extensive resources for community-led research through our open-source contributions.

Roman Numeral analysis is the important task of identifying chords and their functional context in pieces of tonal music. This paper presents a new approach to automatic Roman Numeral analysis in symbolic music. While existing techniques rely on an intermediate lossy representation of the score, we propose a new method based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that enable the direct description and processing of each individual note in the score. The proposed architecture can leverage notewise features and interdependencies between notes but yield onset-wise representation by virtue of our novel edge contraction algorithm. Our results demonstrate that ChordGNN outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, achieving higher accuracy in Roman Numeral analysis on the reference datasets. In addition, we investigate variants of our model using proposed techniques such as NADE, and post-processing of the chord predictions. The full source code for this work is available at https://github.com/manoskary/chordgnn

Harmony is a compact symbolic layer where mathematical pitch relations, acoustic consonance, and musical convention meet. This report treats chord-symbol sequences not as a complete representation of music, but as an interpretable, controllable time series for genre-local harmonic modeling. Starting from a frozen pop-jazz Music Transformer checkpoint, I evaluate how far small adaptation interfaces can extend the model to eleven target genres: blues, bossa nova, Bach chorales, country, electronic, folk, funk, gospel, hip-hop, R&B/soul, and rock. The main evaluation compares LoRA, IA3, BitFit, prefix tuning, and full fine-tuning over 11 genres and 3 seeds, a complete 165-cell grid. All five methods improve over the frozen base on held-out chord prediction, with macro gains from +2.89 to +3.61 points; LoRA and IA3 score highest, but Wilcoxon tests with Holm and Benjamini-Hochberg correction do not support a decisive winner. A matched-data-size control sharpens this: when genres are sub-sampled to a common corpus size, IA3 stays on top but LoRA's full-data edge disappears and it falls to last, indicating the small gaps are partly data-driven. A control-token baseline is also strong, and wrong-genre adapters often beat the frozen base, suggesting much of the effect comes from lightweight conditioning over a reusable harmonic base rather than one particular adapter family. Additional diagnostics (rank sweeps, wrong-genre rotation, a base-checkpoint ablation, chord-only genre classification, generated-output statistics, real-song evaluation, and duplicate analysis) support a bounded conclusion: chord-symbol adaptation reliably improves genre-local harmonic prediction, but chord symbols alone do not carry complete genre identity. The report therefore avoids claims about perceived genre authenticity or full musical quality, which require controlled listener or musician evaluation.

We propose a system for rendering a symbolic piano performance with flexible musical expression. It is necessary to actively control musical expression for creating a new music performance that conveys various emotions or nuances. However, previous approaches were limited to following the composer's guidelines of musical expression or dealing with only a part of the musical attributes. We aim to disentangle the entire musical expression and structural attribute of piano performance using a conditional VAE framework. It stochastically generates expressive parameters from latent representations and given note structures. In addition, we employ self-supervised approaches that force the latent variables to represent target attributes. Finally, we leverage a two-step encoder and decoder that learn hierarchical dependency to enhance the naturalness of the output. Experimental results show that our system can stably generate performance parameters relevant to the given musical scores, learn disentangled representations, and control musical attributes independently of each other.

Understanding complete musical scores entails integrated reasoning over pitch, rhythm, harmony, and large-scale structure, yet the ability of Large Language Models and Vision--Language Models to interpret full musical notation remains insufficiently examined. We introduce Musical Score Understanding Benchmark (MSU-Bench), a human-curated benchmark for score-level musical understanding across textual (ABC notation) and visual (PDF) modalities. MSU-Bench contains 1,800 generative question-answer pairs from works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and others, organised into four levels of increasing difficulty, ranging from onset information to texture and form. Evaluations of more than fifteen state-of-the-art models, in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, reveal pronounced modality gaps, unstable level-wise performance, and challenges in maintaining multilevel correctness. Fine-tuning substantially improves results across modalities while preserving general knowledge, positioning MSU-Bench as a robust foundation for future research in multimodal reasoning. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/Congren-Dai/MSU-Bench.

We introduce an extensive new dataset of MIDI files, created by transcribing audio recordings of piano performances into their constituent notes. The data pipeline we use is multi-stage, employing a language model to autonomously crawl and score audio recordings from the internet based on their metadata, followed by a stage of pruning and segmentation using an audio classifier. The resulting dataset contains over one million distinct MIDI files, comprising roughly 100,000 hours of transcribed audio. We provide an in-depth analysis of our techniques, offering statistical insights, and investigate the content by extracting metadata tags, which we also provide. Dataset available at https://github.com/loubbrad/aria-midi.

Estimating the performance difficulty of a musical score is crucial in music education for adequately designing the learning curriculum of the students. Although the Music Information Retrieval community has recently shown interest in this task, existing approaches mainly use machine-readable scores, leaving the broader case of sheet music images unaddressed. Based on previous works involving sheet music images, we use a mid-level representation, bootleg score, describing notehead positions relative to staff lines coupled with a transformer model. This architecture is adapted to our task by introducing an encoding scheme that reduces the encoded sequence length to one-eighth of the original size. In terms of evaluation, we consider five datasets -- more than 7500 scores with up to 9 difficulty levels -- , two of them particularly compiled for this work. The results obtained when pretraining the scheme on the IMSLP corpus and fine-tuning it on the considered datasets prove the proposal's validity, achieving the best-performing model with a balanced accuracy of 40.34\% and a mean square error of 1.33. Finally, we provide access to our code, data, and models for transparency and reproducibility.

Studying under-represented music traditions under the MIR scope is crucial, not only for developing novel analysis tools, but also for unveiling musical functions that might prove useful in studying world musics. This paper presents a dataset for Greek Traditional and Folk music that includes 1570 pieces, summing in around 80 hours of data. The dataset incorporates YouTube timestamped links for retrieving audio and video, along with rich metadata information with regards to instrumentation, geography and genre, among others. The content has been collected from a Greek documentary series that is available online, where academics present music traditions of Greece with live music and dance performance during the show, along with discussions about social, cultural and musicological aspects of the presented music. Therefore, this procedure has resulted in a significant wealth of descriptions regarding a variety of aspects, such as musical genre, places of origin and musical instruments. In addition, the audio recordings were performed under strict production-level specifications, in terms of recording equipment, leading to very clean and homogeneous audio content. In this work, apart from presenting the dataset in detail, we propose a baseline deep-learning classification approach to recognize the involved musicological attributes. The dataset, the baseline classification methods and the models are provided in public repositories. Future directions for further refining the dataset are also discussed.

In this work, we present Score MUsic Graph (SMUG)-Explain, a framework for generating and visualizing explanations of graph neural networks applied to arbitrary prediction tasks on musical scores. Our system allows the user to visualize the contribution of input notes (and note features) to the network output, directly in the context of the musical score. We provide an interactive interface based on the music notation engraving library Verovio. We showcase the usage of SMUG-Explain on the task of cadence detection in classical music. All code is available on https://github.com/manoskary/SMUG-Explain.

Recent advances in audio-text large language models (LLMs) have opened new possibilities for music understanding and generation. However, existing benchmarks are limited in scope, often relying on simplified tasks or multi-choice evaluations that fail to reflect the complexity of real-world music analysis. We reinterpret a broad range of traditional MIR annotations as instruction-following formats and introduce CMI-Bench, a comprehensive music instruction following benchmark designed to evaluate audio-text LLMs on a diverse set of music information retrieval (MIR) tasks. These include genre classification, emotion regression, emotion tagging, instrument classification, pitch estimation, key detection, lyrics transcription, melody extraction, vocal technique recognition, instrument performance technique detection, music tagging, music captioning, and (down)beat tracking: reflecting core challenges in MIR research. Unlike previous benchmarks, CMI-Bench adopts standardized evaluation metrics consistent with previous state-of-the-art MIR models, ensuring direct comparability with supervised approaches. We provide an evaluation toolkit supporting all open-source audio-textual LLMs, including LTU, Qwen-audio, SALMONN, MusiLingo, etc. Experiment results reveal significant performance gaps between LLMs and supervised models, along with their culture, chronological and gender bias, highlighting the potential and limitations of current models in addressing MIR tasks. CMI-Bench establishes a unified foundation for evaluating music instruction following, driving progress in music-aware LLMs.

Foundation models have transformed vision and language processing by providing rich, reusable representations that transfer across diverse tasks. Sheet music, as a visual encoding of musical language, lacks such a strong domain-specific backbone. We introduce MuSViT (Music Score Vision Transformer): the first foundation vision model for sheet music representation -- a ViT encoder pre-trained via Masked Autoencoders on 9.7 million pages from the IMSLP. To handle the complexity of real-world scores, we adopt a two-stage curriculum: a synthetic warm-up on typeset scores followed by large-scale training on the full IMSLP corpus. We evaluate MuSViT on four downstream tasks -- full-page and staff-level music score recognition, music symbol detection, and score difficulty classification -- under two scenarios: linear probing (frozen encoder) and fine-tuning. Under linear probing, MuSViT consistently outperforms modern vision encoders, revealing that general-purpose representations, regardless of scale, fall systematically short on the structured symbolic properties of musical notation. Under fine-tuning, MuSViT generally improves upon task-specific state-of-the-art methods. An additional embedding-transcription consistency analysis reveals that MuSViT encodes symbolic musical structure directly in its representation space -- unlike other encoders, whose embeddings do not correlate with music notation content. These results establish MuSViT as a foundation backbone for sheet music understanding.

The rise of "bedroom producers" has democratized music creation, while challenging producers to objectively evaluate their work. To address this, we present AI TrackMate, an LLM-based music chatbot designed to provide constructive feedback on music productions. By combining LLMs' inherent musical knowledge with direct audio track analysis, AI TrackMate offers production-specific insights, distinguishing it from text-only approaches. Our framework integrates a Music Analysis Module, an LLM-Readable Music Report, and Music Production-Oriented Feedback Instruction, creating a plug-and-play, training-free system compatible with various LLMs and adaptable to future advancements. We demonstrate AI TrackMate's capabilities through an interactive web interface and present findings from a pilot study with a music producer. By bridging AI capabilities with the needs of independent producers, AI TrackMate offers on-demand analytical feedback, potentially supporting the creative process and skill development in music production. This system addresses the growing demand for objective self-assessment tools in the evolving landscape of independent music production.

The online estimation of rhythmic information, such as beat positions, downbeat positions, and meter, is critical for many real-time music applications. Musical rhythm comprises complex hierarchical relationships across time, rendering its analysis intrinsically challenging and at times subjective. Furthermore, systems which attempt to estimate rhythmic information in real-time must be causal and must produce estimates quickly and efficiently. In this work, we introduce an online system for joint beat, downbeat, and meter tracking, which utilizes causal convolutional and recurrent layers, followed by a pair of sequential Monte Carlo particle filters applied during inference. The proposed system does not need to be primed with a time signature in order to perform downbeat tracking, and is instead able to estimate meter and adjust the predictions over time. Additionally, we propose an information gate strategy to significantly decrease the computational cost of particle filtering during the inference step, making the system much faster than previous sampling-based methods. Experiments on the GTZAN dataset, which is unseen during training, show that the system outperforms various online beat and downbeat tracking systems and achieves comparable performance to a baseline offline joint method.

Distributional metrics such as Fréchet Audio Distance cannot score individual music clips and correlate poorly with human judgments, while the only per-sample learned metric achieving high human correlation is closed-source. We introduce MUQ-EVAL, an open-source per-sample quality metric for AIgenerated music built by training lightweight prediction heads on frozen MuQ-310M features using MusicEval, a dataset of generated clips from 31 text-to-music systems with expert quality ratings. Our simplest model, frozen features with attention pooling and a two-layer MLP, achieves system-level SRCC = 0.957 and utterance-level SRCC = 0.838 with human mean opinion scores. A systematic ablation over training objectives and adaptation strategies shows that no addition meaningfully improves the frozen baseline, indicating that frozen MuQ representations already capture quality-relevant information. Encoder choice is the dominant design factor, outweighing all architectural and training decisions. LoRA-adapted models trained on as few as 150 clips already achieve usable correlation, enabling personalized quality evaluators from individual listener annotations. A controlled degradation analysis reveals selective sensitivity to signal-level artifacts but insensitivity to musical-structural distortions. Our metric, MUQ-EVAL, is fully open-source, outperforms existing open per-sample metrics, and runs in real time on a single consumer GPU. Code, model weights, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/dgtql/MuQ-Eval.

Beat tracking in musical performance MIDI is a challenging and important task for notation-level music transcription and rhythmical analysis, yet existing methods primarily focus on audio-based approaches. This paper proposes an end-to-end transformer-based model for beat and downbeat tracking in performance MIDI, leveraging an encoder-decoder architecture for sequence-to-sequence translation of MIDI input to beat annotations. Our approach introduces novel data preprocessing techniques, including dynamic augmentation and optimized tokenization strategies, to improve accuracy and generalizability across different datasets. We conduct extensive experiments using the A-MAPS, ASAP, GuitarSet, and Leduc datasets, comparing our model against state-of-the-art hidden Markov models (HMMs) and deep learning-based beat tracking methods. The results demonstrate that our model outperforms existing symbolic music beat tracking approaches, achieving competitive F1-scores across various musical styles and instruments. Our findings highlight the potential of transformer architectures for symbolic beat tracking and suggest future integration with automatic music transcription systems for enhanced music analysis and score generation.

Multi-modal deep learning techniques for matching free-form text with music have shown promising results in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Prior work is often based on large proprietary data while publicly available datasets are few and small in size. In this study, we present WikiMuTe, a new and open dataset containing rich semantic descriptions of music. The data is sourced from Wikipedia's rich catalogue of articles covering musical works. Using a dedicated text-mining pipeline, we extract both long and short-form descriptions covering a wide range of topics related to music content such as genre, style, mood, instrumentation, and tempo. To show the use of this data, we train a model that jointly learns text and audio representations and performs cross-modal retrieval. The model is evaluated on two tasks: tag-based music retrieval and music auto-tagging. The results show that while our approach has state-of-the-art performance on multiple tasks, but still observe a difference in performance depending on the data used for training.

We propose a new graph convolutional block, called MusGConv, specifically designed for the efficient processing of musical score data and motivated by general perceptual principles. It focuses on two fundamental dimensions of music, pitch and rhythm, and considers both relative and absolute representations of these components. We evaluate our approach on four different musical understanding problems: monophonic voice separation, harmonic analysis, cadence detection, and composer identification which, in abstract terms, translate to different graph learning problems, namely, node classification, link prediction, and graph classification. Our experiments demonstrate that MusGConv improves the performance on three of the aforementioned tasks while being conceptually very simple and efficient. We interpret this as evidence that it is beneficial to include perception-informed processing of fundamental musical concepts when developing graph network applications on musical score data.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various vision-language tasks. However, their reasoning abilities in the multimodal symbolic music domain remain largely unexplored. We introduce WildScore, the first in-the-wild multimodal symbolic music reasoning and analysis benchmark, designed to evaluate MLLMs' capacity to interpret real-world music scores and answer complex musicological queries. Each instance in WildScore is sourced from genuine musical compositions and accompanied by authentic user-generated questions and discussions, capturing the intricacies of practical music analysis. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we propose a systematic taxonomy, comprising both high-level and fine-grained musicological ontologies. Furthermore, we frame complex music reasoning as multiple-choice question answering, enabling controlled and scalable assessment of MLLMs' symbolic music understanding. Empirical benchmarking of state-of-the-art MLLMs on WildScore reveals intriguing patterns in their visual-symbolic reasoning, uncovering both promising directions and persistent challenges for MLLMs in symbolic music reasoning and analysis. We release the dataset and code.

The Charlie Parker Omnibook is a cornerstone of jazz music education, described by pianist Ethan Iverson as "the most important jazz education text ever published". In this work we propose a new transcription pipeline and explore the extent to which state of the art music technology is able to reconstruct these scores directly from the audio without human intervention. Our pipeline includes: a newly trained source separation model for saxophone, a new MIDI transcription model for solo saxophone and an adaptation of an existing MIDI-to-score method for monophonic instruments. To assess this pipeline we also provide an enhanced dataset of Charlie Parker transcriptions as score-audio pairs with accurate MIDI alignments and downbeat annotations. This represents a challenging new benchmark for automatic audio-to-score transcription that we hope will advance research into areas beyond transcribing audio-to-MIDI alone. Together, these form another step towards producing scores that musicians can use directly, without the need for onerous corrections or revisions. To facilitate future research, all model checkpoints and data are made available to download along with code for the transcription pipeline. Improvements in our modular pipeline could one day make the automatic transcription of complex jazz solos a routine possibility, thereby enriching the resources available for music education and preservation.

Sonification -- the mapping of data to non-speech audio -- offers an underexplored channel for representing complex dynamical systems. We treat El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a canonical example of low-dimensional climate chaos, as a test case for culturally-situated sonification evaluated through complex systems diagnostics. Using parameter-mapping sonification of the Niño 3.4 sea surface temperature anomaly index (1870--2024), we encode ENSO variability into two traditional Javanese gamelan pentatonic systems (pelog and slendro) across four composition strategies, then analyze the resulting audio as trajectories in a two-dimensional acoustic phase space. Recurrence-based diagnostics, convex hull geometry, and coupling analysis reveal that the sonification pipeline preserves key dynamical signatures: alternating modes produce the highest trajectory recurrence rates, echoing ENSO's quasi-periodicity; layered polyphonic modes explore the broadest phase space regions; and the two scale families induce qualitatively distinct coupling regimes between spectral brightness and energy -- predominantly anti-phase in pelog but near-independent in slendro. Phase space trajectory analysis provides a rigorous geometric framework for comparing sonification designs within a complex systems context. Perceptual validation remains necessary; we contribute the dynamical systems methodology for evaluating such mappings.

Large language models have shown significant capabilities across various domains, including symbolic music generation. However, leveraging these pre-trained models for controllable music arrangement tasks, each requiring different forms of musical information as control, remains a novel challenge. In this paper, we propose a unified sequence-to-sequence framework that enables the fine-tuning of a symbolic music language model for multiple multi-track arrangement tasks, including band arrangement, piano reduction, drum arrangement, and voice separation. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves higher musical quality compared to task-specific baselines across all four tasks. Furthermore, through additional experiments on probing analysis, we show the pre-training phase equips the model with essential knowledge to understand musical conditions, which is hard to acquired solely through task-specific fine-tuning.

Countless learning tasks require dealing with sequential data. Image captioning, speech synthesis, and music generation all require that a model produce outputs that are sequences. In other domains, such as time series prediction, video analysis, and musical information retrieval, a model must learn from inputs that are sequences. Interactive tasks, such as translating natural language, engaging in dialogue, and controlling a robot, often demand both capabilities. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are connectionist models that capture the dynamics of sequences via cycles in the network of nodes. Unlike standard feedforward neural networks, recurrent networks retain a state that can represent information from an arbitrarily long context window. Although recurrent neural networks have traditionally been difficult to train, and often contain millions of parameters, recent advances in network architectures, optimization techniques, and parallel computation have enabled successful large-scale learning with them. In recent years, systems based on long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional (BRNN) architectures have demonstrated ground-breaking performance on tasks as varied as image captioning, language translation, and handwriting recognition. In this survey, we review and synthesize the research that over the past three decades first yielded and then made practical these powerful learning models. When appropriate, we reconcile conflicting notation and nomenclature. Our goal is to provide a self-contained explication of the state of the art together with a historical perspective and references to primary research.

We present and release MIDI-GPT, a generative system based on the Transformer architecture that is designed for computer-assisted music composition workflows. MIDI-GPT supports the infilling of musical material at the track and bar level, and can condition generation on attributes including: instrument type, musical style, note density, polyphony level, and note duration. In order to integrate these features, we employ an alternative representation for musical material, creating a time-ordered sequence of musical events for each track and concatenating several tracks into a single sequence, rather than using a single time-ordered sequence where the musical events corresponding to different tracks are interleaved. We also propose a variation of our representation allowing for expressiveness. We present experimental results that demonstrate that MIDI-GPT is able to consistently avoid duplicating the musical material it was trained on, generate music that is stylistically similar to the training dataset, and that attribute controls allow enforcing various constraints on the generated material. We also outline several real-world applications of MIDI-GPT, including collaborations with industry partners that explore the integration and evaluation of MIDI-GPT into commercial products, as well as several artistic works produced using it.

This paper investigates the potential for large language models (LLMs) to develop private tonal languages for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. Inspired by cryptophasia in human twins (affecting up to 50% of twin births) and natural tonal languages like Mandarin and Vietnamese, we implement a precise character-to-frequency mapping system that encodes the full ASCII character set (32-126) using musical semitones. Each character is assigned a unique frequency, creating a logarithmic progression beginning with space (220 Hz) and ending with tilde (50,175.42 Hz). This spans approximately 7.9 octaves, with higher characters deliberately mapped to ultrasonic frequencies beyond human perception (>20 kHz). Our implemented software prototype demonstrates this encoding through visualization, auditory playback, and ABC musical notation, allowing for analysis of information density and transmission speed. Testing reveals that tonal encoding can achieve information rates exceeding human speech while operating partially outside human perceptual boundaries. This work responds directly to concerns about AI systems catastrophically developing private languages within the next five years, providing a concrete prototype software example of how such communication might function and the technical foundation required for its emergence, detection, and governance.

In this work, we introduce the Sheet Music Benchmark (SMB), a dataset of six hundred and eighty-five pages specifically designed to benchmark Optical Music Recognition (OMR) research. SMB encompasses a diverse array of musical textures, including monophony, pianoform, quartet, and others, all encoded in Common Western Modern Notation using the Humdrum **kern format. Alongside SMB, we introduce the OMR Normalized Edit Distance (OMR-NED), a new metric tailored explicitly for evaluating OMR performance. OMR-NED builds upon the widely-used Symbol Error Rate (SER), offering a fine-grained and detailed error analysis that covers individual musical elements such as note heads, beams, pitches, accidentals, and other critical notation features. The resulting numeric score provided by OMR-NED facilitates clear comparisons, enabling researchers and end-users alike to identify optimal OMR approaches. Our work thus addresses a long-standing gap in OMR evaluation, and we support our contributions with baseline experiments using standardized SMB dataset splits for training and assessing state-of-the-art methods.

Multimodal models that jointly process audio and language hold great promise in audio understanding and are increasingly being adopted in the music domain. By allowing users to query via text and obtain information about a given audio input, these models have the potential to enable a variety of music understanding tasks via language-based interfaces. However, their evaluation poses considerable challenges, and it remains unclear how to effectively assess their ability to correctly interpret music-related inputs with current methods. Motivated by this, we introduce MuChoMusic, a benchmark for evaluating music understanding in multimodal language models focused on audio. MuChoMusic comprises 1,187 multiple-choice questions, all validated by human annotators, on 644 music tracks sourced from two publicly available music datasets, and covering a wide variety of genres. Questions in the benchmark are crafted to assess knowledge and reasoning abilities across several dimensions that cover fundamental musical concepts and their relation to cultural and functional contexts. Through the holistic analysis afforded by the benchmark, we evaluate five open-source models and identify several pitfalls, including an over-reliance on the language modality, pointing to a need for better multimodal integration. Data and code are open-sourced.

Conventional music structure analysis algorithms aim to divide a song into segments and to group them with abstract labels (e.g., 'A', 'B', and 'C'). However, explicitly identifying the function of each segment (e.g., 'verse' or 'chorus') is rarely attempted, but has many applications. We introduce a multi-task deep learning framework to model these structural semantic labels directly from audio by estimating "verseness," "chorusness," and so forth, as a function of time. We propose a 7-class taxonomy (i.e., intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro, instrumental, and silence) and provide rules to consolidate annotations from four disparate datasets. We also propose to use a spectral-temporal Transformer-based model, called SpecTNT, which can be trained with an additional connectionist temporal localization (CTL) loss. In cross-dataset evaluations using four public datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the SpecTNT model and CTL loss, and obtain strong results overall: the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art chorus-detection and boundary-detection methods at detecting choruses and boundaries, respectively.

In this paper, we address the challenge of Optical Music Recognition (OMR) for handwritten jazz lead sheets, a widely used musical score type that encodes melody and chords. The task is challenging due to the presence of chords, a score component not handled by existing OMR systems, and the high variability and quality issues associated with handwritten images. Our contribution is two-fold. We present a novel dataset consisting of 293 handwritten jazz lead sheets of 163 unique pieces, amounting to 2021 total staves aligned with Humdrum **kern and MusicXML ground truth scores. We also supply synthetic score images generated from the ground truth. The second contribution is the development of an OMR model for jazz lead sheets. We discuss specific tokenisation choices related to our kind of data, and the advantages of using synthetic scores and pretrained models. We publicly release all code, data, and models.

Despite the central role that melody plays in music perception, it remains an open challenge in music information retrieval to reliably detect the notes of the melody present in an arbitrary music recording. A key challenge in melody transcription is building methods which can handle broad audio containing any number of instrument ensembles and musical styles - existing strategies work well for some melody instruments or styles but not all. To confront this challenge, we leverage representations from Jukebox (Dhariwal et al. 2020), a generative model of broad music audio, thereby improving performance on melody transcription by 20% relative to conventional spectrogram features. Another obstacle in melody transcription is a lack of training data - we derive a new dataset containing 50 hours of melody transcriptions from crowdsourced annotations of broad music. The combination of generative pre-training and a new dataset for this task results in 77% stronger performance on melody transcription relative to the strongest available baseline. By pairing our new melody transcription approach with solutions for beat detection, key estimation, and chord recognition, we build Sheet Sage, a system capable of transcribing human-readable lead sheets directly from music audio. Audio examples can be found at https://chrisdonahue.com/sheetsage and code at https://github.com/chrisdonahue/sheetsage .

This paper aims to develop a holistic evaluation method for piano sound quality to assist in purchasing decisions. Unlike previous studies that focused on the effect of piano performance techniques on sound quality, this study evaluates the inherent sound quality of different pianos. To derive quality evaluation systems, the study uses subjective questionnaires based on a piano sound quality dataset. The method selects the optimal piano classification models by comparing the fine-tuning results of different pre-training models of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). To improve the interpretability of the models, the study applies Equivalent Rectangular Bandwidth (ERB) analysis. The results reveal that musically trained individuals are better able to distinguish between the sound quality differences of different pianos. The best fine-tuned CNN pre-trained backbone achieves a high accuracy of 98.3\% as the piano classifier. However, the dataset is limited, and the audio is sliced to increase its quantity, resulting in a lack of diversity and balance, so we use focal loss to reduce the impact of data imbalance. To optimize the method, the dataset will be expanded, or few-shot learning techniques will be employed in future research.

We propose MelodySim, a melody-aware music similarity model and dataset for plagiarism detection. First, we introduce a novel method to construct a dataset with focus on melodic similarity. By augmenting Slakh2100; an existing MIDI dataset, we generate variations of each piece while preserving the melody through modifications such as note splitting, arpeggiation, minor track dropout (excluding bass), and re-instrumentation. A user study confirms that positive pairs indeed contain similar melodies, with other musical tracks significantly changed. Second, we develop a segment-wise melodic-similarity detection model that uses a MERT encoder and applies a triplet neural network to capture melodic similarity. The resultant decision matrix highlights where plagiarism might occur. Our model achieves high accuracy on the MelodySim test set.

In tandem with the recent advancements in foundation model research, there has been a surge of generative music AI applications within the past few years. As the idea of AI-generated or AI-augmented music becomes more mainstream, many researchers in the music AI community may be wondering what avenues of research are left. With regards to music generative models, we outline the current areas of research with significant room for exploration. Firstly, we pose the question of foundational representation of these generative models and investigate approaches towards explainability. Next, we discuss the current state of music datasets and their limitations. We then overview different generative models, forms of evaluating these models, and their computational constraints/limitations. Subsequently, we highlight applications of these generative models towards extensions to multiple modalities and integration with artists' workflow as well as music education systems. Finally, we survey the potential copyright implications of generative music and discuss strategies for protecting the rights of musicians. While it is not meant to be exhaustive, our survey calls to attention a variety of research directions enabled by music foundation models.

This study evaluates the baseline capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to learn concepts in music theory through in-context learning and chain-of-thought prompting. Using carefully designed prompts (in-context learning) and step-by-step worked examples (chain-of-thought prompting), we explore how LLMs can be taught increasingly complex material and how pedagogical strategies for human learners translate to educating machines. Performance is evaluated using questions from an official Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) Level 6 examination, which covers a comprehensive range of topics, including interval and chord identification, key detection, cadence classification, and metrical analysis. Additionally, we evaluate the suitability of various music encoding formats for these tasks (ABC, Humdrum, MEI, MusicXML). All experiments were run both with and without contextual prompts. Results indicate that without context, ChatGPT with MEI performs the best at 52%, while with context, Claude with MEI performs the best at 75%. Future work will further refine prompts and expand to cover more advanced music theory concepts. This research contributes to the broader understanding of teaching LLMs and has applications for educators, students, and developers of AI music tools alike.

We explore the potential of a popular distributional semantics vector space model, word2vec, for capturing meaningful relationships in ecological (complex polyphonic) music. More precisely, the skip-gram version of word2vec is used to model slices of music from a large corpus spanning eight musical genres. In this newly learned vector space, a metric based on cosine distance is able to distinguish between functional chord relationships, as well as harmonic associations in the music. Evidence, based on cosine distance between chord-pair vectors, suggests that an implicit circle-of-fifths exists in the vector space. In addition, a comparison between pieces in different keys reveals that key relationships are represented in word2vec space. These results suggest that the newly learned embedded vector representation does in fact capture tonal and harmonic characteristics of music, without receiving explicit information about the musical content of the constituent slices. In order to investigate whether proximity in the discovered space of embeddings is indicative of `semantically-related' slices, we explore a music generation task, by automatically replacing existing slices from a given piece of music with new slices. We propose an algorithm to find substitute slices based on spatial proximity and the pitch class distribution inferred in the chosen subspace. The results indicate that the size of the subspace used has a significant effect on whether slices belonging to the same key are selected. In sum, the proposed word2vec model is able to learn music-vector embeddings that capture meaningful tonal and harmonic relationships in music, thereby providing a useful tool for exploring musical properties and comparisons across pieces, as a potential input representation for deep learning models, and as a music generation device.

A great number of deep learning based models have been recently proposed for automatic music composition. Among these models, the Transformer stands out as a prominent approach for generating expressive classical piano performance with a coherent structure of up to one minute. The model is powerful in that it learns abstractions of data on its own, without much human-imposed domain knowledge or constraints. In contrast with this general approach, this paper shows that Transformers can do even better for music modeling, when we improve the way a musical score is converted into the data fed to a Transformer model. In particular, we seek to impose a metrical structure in the input data, so that Transformers can be more easily aware of the beat-bar-phrase hierarchical structure in music. The new data representation maintains the flexibility of local tempo changes, and provides hurdles to control the rhythmic and harmonic structure of music. With this approach, we build a Pop Music Transformer that composes Pop piano music with better rhythmic structure than existing Transformer models.

Rhythm transcription is a key subtask of notation-level Automatic Music Transcription (AMT). While deep learning models have been extensively used for detecting the metrical grid in audio and MIDI performances, beat-based rhythm quantization remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce a novel deep learning approach for quantizing MIDI performances using a priori beat information. Our method leverages the transformer architecture to effectively process synchronized score and performance data for training a quantization model. Key components of our approach include dataset preparation, a beat-based pre-quantization method to align performance and score times within a unified framework, and a MIDI tokenizer tailored for this task. We adapt a transformer model based on the T5 architecture to meet the specific requirements of rhythm quantization. The model is evaluated using a set of score-level metrics designed for objective assessment of quantization performance. Through systematic evaluation, we optimize both data representation and model architecture. Additionally, we apply performance and score augmentations, such as transposition, note deletion, and performance-side time jitter, to enhance the model's robustness. Finally, a qualitative analysis compares our model's quantization performance against state-of-the-art probabilistic and deep-learning models on various example pieces. Our model achieves an onset F1-score of 97.3% and a note value accuracy of 83.3% on the ASAP dataset. It generalizes well across time signatures, including those not seen during training, and produces readable score output. Fine-tuning on instrument-specific datasets further improves performance by capturing characteristic rhythmic and melodic patterns. This work contributes a robust and flexible framework for beat-based MIDI quantization using transformer models.

The task of efficient automatic music classification is of vital importance and forms the basis for various advanced applications of AI in the musical domain. Musical instrument recognition is the task of instrument identification by virtue of its audio. This audio, also termed as the sound vibrations are leveraged by the model to match with the instrument classes. In this paper, we use an artificial neural network (ANN) model that was trained to perform classification on twenty different classes of musical instruments. Here we use use only the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) of the audio data. Our proposed model trains on the full London philharmonic orchestra dataset which contains twenty classes of instruments belonging to the four families viz. woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings. Based on experimental results our model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the same.

Existing approaches for generating multitrack music with transformer models have been limited in terms of the number of instruments, the length of the music segments and slow inference. This is partly due to the memory requirements of the lengthy input sequences necessitated by existing representations. In this work, we propose a new multitrack music representation that allows a diverse set of instruments while keeping a short sequence length. Our proposed Multitrack Music Transformer (MMT) achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art systems, landing in between two recently proposed models in a subjective listening test, while achieving substantial speedups and memory reductions over both, making the method attractive for real time improvisation or near real time creative applications. Further, we propose a new measure for analyzing musical self-attention and show that the trained model attends more to notes that form a consonant interval with the current note and to notes that are 4N beats away from the current step.

Music two-tower multimodal systems integrate audio and text modalities into a joint audio-text space, enabling direct comparison between songs and their corresponding labels. These systems enable new approaches for classification and retrieval, leveraging both modalities. Despite the promising results they have shown for zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks, closer inspection of the embeddings is needed. This paper evaluates the inherent zero-shot properties of joint audio-text spaces for the case-study of instrument recognition. We present an evaluation and analysis of two-tower systems for zero-shot instrument recognition and a detailed analysis of the properties of the pre-joint and joint embeddings spaces. Our findings suggest that audio encoders alone demonstrate good quality, while challenges remain within the text encoder or joint space projection. Specifically, two-tower systems exhibit sensitivity towards specific words, favoring generic prompts over musically informed ones. Despite the large size of textual encoders, they do not yet leverage additional textual context or infer instruments accurately from their descriptions. Lastly, a novel approach for quantifying the semantic meaningfulness of the textual space leveraging an instrument ontology is proposed. This method reveals deficiencies in the systems' understanding of instruments and provides evidence of the need for fine-tuning text encoders on musical data.

We propose a novel symbolic music representation and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework specially designed for symbolic multitrack music generation. The main theme of symbolic music generation primarily encompasses the preprocessing of music data and the implementation of a deep learning framework. Current techniques dedicated to symbolic music generation generally encounter two significant challenges: training data's lack of information about chords and scales and the requirement of specially designed model architecture adapted to the unique format of symbolic music representation. In this paper, we solve the above problems by introducing new symbolic music representation with MusicLang chord analysis model. We propose our MMT-BERT architecture adapting to the representation. To build a robust multitrack music generator, we fine-tune a pre-trained MusicBERT model to serve as the discriminator, and incorporate relativistic standard loss. This approach, supported by the in-depth understanding of symbolic music encoded within MusicBERT, fortifies the consonance and humanity of music generated by our method. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach which strictly follows the state-of-the-art methods.

This article motivates, describes, and presents the PBSCR dataset for studying composer recognition of classical piano music. Our goal was to design a dataset that facilitates large-scale research on composer recognition that is suitable for modern architectures and training practices. To achieve this goal, we utilize the abundance of sheet music images and rich metadata on IMSLP, use a previously proposed feature representation called a bootleg score to encode the location of noteheads relative to staff lines, and present the data in an extremely simple format (2D binary images) to encourage rapid exploration and iteration. The dataset itself contains 40,000 62x64 bootleg score images for a 9-class recognition task, 100,000 62x64 bootleg score images for a 100-class recognition task, and 29,310 unlabeled variable-length bootleg score images for pretraining. The labeled data is presented in a form that mirrors MNIST images, in order to make it extremely easy to visualize, manipulate, and train models in an efficient manner. We include relevant information to connect each bootleg score image with its underlying raw sheet music image, and we scrape, organize, and compile metadata from IMSLP on all piano works to facilitate multimodal research and allow for convenient linking to other datasets. We release baseline results in a supervised and low-shot setting for future works to compare against, and we discuss open research questions that the PBSCR data is especially well suited to facilitate research on.

This thesis develops a Transformer model based on Whisper, which extracts melodies and chords from music audio and records them into ABC notation. A comprehensive data processing workflow is customized for ABC notation, including data cleansing, formatting, and conversion, and a mutation mechanism is implemented to increase the diversity and quality of training data. This thesis innovatively introduces the "Orpheus' Score", a custom notation system that converts music information into tokens, designs a custom vocabulary library, and trains a corresponding custom tokenizer. Experiments show that compared to traditional algorithms, the model has significantly improved accuracy and performance. While providing a convenient audio-to-score tool for music enthusiasts, this work also provides new ideas and tools for research in music information processing.

Highly-informed Expressive Performance Rendering (EPR) systems transform music scores with rich musical annotations into human-like expressive performance MIDI files. While these systems have achieved promising results, the availability of detailed music scores is limited compared to MIDI files and are less flexible to work with using a digital audio workstation (DAW). Recent advancements in low-informed EPR systems offer a more accessible alternative by directly utilizing score-derived MIDI as input, but these systems often exhibit suboptimal performance. Meanwhile, existing works are evaluated with diverse automatic metrics and data formats, hindering direct objective comparisons between EPR systems. In this study, we introduce Peransformer, a transformer-based low-informed EPR system designed to bridge the gap between low-informed and highly-informed EPR systems. Our approach incorporates a score-aware discriminator that leverages the underlying score-derived MIDI files and is trained on a score-to-performance paired, note-to-note aligned MIDI dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that Peransformer achieves state-of-the-art performance among low-informed systems, as validated by subjective evaluations. Furthermore, we extend existing automatic evaluation metrics for EPR systems and introduce generalized EPR metrics (GEM), enabling more direct, accurate, and reliable comparisons across EPR systems.

Automatic chord recognition (ACR) via deep learning models has gradually achieved promising recognition accuracy, yet two key challenges remain. First, prior work has primarily focused on audio-domain ACR, while symbolic music (e.g., score) ACR has received limited attention due to data scarcity. Second, existing methods still overlook strategies that are aligned with human music analytical practices. To address these challenges, we make two contributions: (1) we introduce POP909-CL, an enhanced version of POP909 dataset with tempo-aligned content and human-corrected labels of chords, beats, keys, and time signatures; and (2) We propose BACHI, a symbolic chord recognition model that decomposes the task into different decision steps, namely boundary detection and iterative ranking of chord root, quality, and bass (inversion). This mechanism mirrors the human ear-training practices. Experiments demonstrate that BACHI achieves state-of-the-art chord recognition performance on both classical and pop music benchmarks, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of each module.

The evaluation of music understanding in Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) requires a rigorously defined benchmark that truly tests whether models can perceive and interpret music, a standard that current data methodologies frequently fail to meet. This paper introduces a meticulously structured approach to music evaluation, proposing a new dataset of 320 hand-written questions curated and validated by experts with musical training, arguing that such focused, manual curation is superior for probing complex audio comprehension. To demonstrate the use of the dataset, we benchmark six state-of-the-art LALMs and additionally test their robustness to uni-modal shortcuts.

In recent years, foundation models (FMs) such as large language models (LLMs) and latent diffusion models (LDMs) have profoundly impacted diverse sectors, including music. This comprehensive review examines state-of-the-art (SOTA) pre-trained models and foundation models in music, spanning from representation learning, generative learning and multimodal learning. We first contextualise the significance of music in various industries and trace the evolution of AI in music. By delineating the modalities targeted by foundation models, we discover many of the music representations are underexplored in FM development. Then, emphasis is placed on the lack of versatility of previous methods on diverse music applications, along with the potential of FMs in music understanding, generation and medical application. By comprehensively exploring the details of the model pre-training paradigm, architectural choices, tokenisation, finetuning methodologies and controllability, we emphasise the important topics that should have been well explored, like instruction tuning and in-context learning, scaling law and emergent ability, as well as long-sequence modelling etc. A dedicated section presents insights into music agents, accompanied by a thorough analysis of datasets and evaluations essential for pre-training and downstream tasks. Finally, by underscoring the vital importance of ethical considerations, we advocate that following research on FM for music should focus more on such issues as interpretability, transparency, human responsibility, and copyright issues. The paper offers insights into future challenges and trends on FMs for music, aiming to shape the trajectory of human-AI collaboration in the music realm.

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.

In this paper we present a new dataset, with musical excepts from the three main ethnic groups in Singapore: Chinese, Malay and Indian (both Hindi and Tamil). We use this new dataset to train different classification models to distinguish the origin of the music in terms of these ethnic groups. The classification models were optimized by exploring the use of different musical features as the input. Both high level features, i.e., musically meaningful features, as well as low level features, i.e., spectrogram based features, were extracted from the audio files so as to optimize the performance of the different classification models.

The current wave of deep learning (the hyper-vitamined return of artificial neural networks) applies not only to traditional statistical machine learning tasks: prediction and classification (e.g., for weather prediction and pattern recognition), but has already conquered other areas, such as translation. A growing area of application is the generation of creative content, notably the case of music, the topic of this paper. The motivation is in using the capacity of modern deep learning techniques to automatically learn musical styles from arbitrary musical corpora and then to generate musical samples from the estimated distribution, with some degree of control over the generation. This paper provides a tutorial on music generation based on deep learning techniques. After a short introduction to the topic illustrated by a recent exemple, the paper analyzes some early works from the late 1980s using artificial neural networks for music generation and how their pioneering contributions have prefigured current techniques. Then, we introduce some conceptual framework to analyze the various concepts and dimensions involved. Various examples of recent systems are introduced and analyzed to illustrate the variety of concerns and of techniques.

While recent generative models can produce engaging music, their utility is limited. The variation in the music is often left to chance, resulting in compositions that lack structure. Pieces extending beyond a minute can become incoherent or repetitive. This paper introduces an approach for generating structured, arbitrarily long musical pieces. Central to this approach is the creation of musical segments using a conditional generative model, with transitions between these segments. The generation of prompts that determine the high-level composition is distinct from the creation of finer, lower-level details. A large language model is then used to suggest the musical form.

VisionScores presents a novel proposal being the first system-segmented image score dataset, aiming to offer structure-rich, high information-density images for machine and deep learning tasks. Delimited to two-handed piano pieces, it was built to consider not only certain graphic similarity but also composition patterns, as this creative process is highly instrument-dependent. It provides two scenarios in relation to composer and composition type. The first, formed by 14k samples, considers works from different authors but the same composition type, specifically, Sonatinas. The latter, consisting of 10.8K samples, presents the opposite case, various composition types from the same author, being the one selected Franz Liszt. All of the 24.8k samples are formatted as grayscale jpg images of 128 times 512 pixels. VisionScores supplies the users not only the formatted samples but the systems' order and pieces' metadata. Moreover, unsegmented full-page scores and the pre-formatted images are included for further analysis.

This paper targets the perceptual task of separating the different interacting voices, i.e., monophonic melodic streams, in a polyphonic musical piece. We target symbolic music, where notes are explicitly encoded, and model this task as a Multi-Trajectory Tracking (MTT) problem from discrete observations, i.e., notes in a pitch-time space. Our approach builds a graph from a musical piece, by creating one node for every note, and separates the melodic trajectories by predicting a link between two notes if they are consecutive in the same voice/stream. This kind of local, greedy prediction is made possible by node embeddings created by a heterogeneous graph neural network that can capture inter- and intra-trajectory information. Furthermore, we propose a new regularization loss that encourages the output to respect the MTT premise of at most one incoming and one outgoing link for every node, favouring monophonic (voice) trajectories; this loss function might also be useful in other general MTT scenarios. Our approach does not use domain-specific heuristics, is scalable to longer sequences and a higher number of voices, and can handle complex cases such as voice inversions and overlaps. We reach new state-of-the-art results for the voice separation task in classical music of different styles.

The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), introduced in 1983, revolutionized music production by allowing computers and instruments to communicate efficiently. MIDI files encode musical instructions compactly, facilitating convenient music sharing. They benefit Music Information Retrieval (MIR), aiding in research on music understanding, computational musicology, and generative music. The GigaMIDI dataset contains over 1.4 million unique MIDI files, encompassing 1.8 billion MIDI note events and over 5.3 million MIDI tracks. GigaMIDI is currently the largest collection of symbolic music in MIDI format available for research purposes under fair dealing. Distinguishing between non-expressive and expressive MIDI tracks is challenging, as MIDI files do not inherently make this distinction. To address this issue, we introduce a set of innovative heuristics for detecting expressive music performance. These include the Distinctive Note Velocity Ratio (DNVR) heuristic, which analyzes MIDI note velocity; the Distinctive Note Onset Deviation Ratio (DNODR) heuristic, which examines deviations in note onset times; and the Note Onset Median Metric Level (NOMML) heuristic, which evaluates onset positions relative to metric levels. Our evaluation demonstrates these heuristics effectively differentiate between non-expressive and expressive MIDI tracks. Furthermore, after evaluation, we create the most substantial expressive MIDI dataset, employing our heuristic, NOMML. This curated iteration of GigaMIDI encompasses expressively-performed instrument tracks detected by NOMML, containing all General MIDI instruments, constituting 31% of the GigaMIDI dataset, totalling 1,655,649 tracks.

Symbolic music research has relied almost exclusively on MIDI-based datasets; text-based engraving formats such as LilyPond remain unexplored for music understanding. We present BMdataset, a musicologically curated dataset of 393 LilyPond scores (2,646 movements) transcribed by experts directly from original Baroque manuscripts, with metadata covering composer, musical form, instrumentation, and sectional attributes. Building on this resource, we introduce LilyBERT (weights can be found at https://huggingface.co/csc-unipd/lilybert), a CodeBERT-based encoder adapted to symbolic music through vocabulary extension with 115 LilyPond-specific tokens and masked language model pre-training. Linear probing on the out-of-domain Mutopia corpus shows that, despite its modest size (~90M tokens), fine-tuning on BMdataset alone outperforms continuous pre-training on the full PDMX corpus (~15B tokens) for both composer and style classification, demonstrating that small, expertly curated datasets can be more effective than large, noisy corpora for music understanding. Combining broad pre-training with domain-specific fine-tuning yields the best results overall (84.3% composer accuracy), confirming that the two data regimes are complementary. We release the dataset, tokenizer, and model to establish a baseline for representation learning on LilyPond.

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the NeuroPiano dataset, which comprise 104 audio recordings of student piano performances accompanied with 2255 textual feedback and ratings given by professional pianists. We offer a statistical overview of the dataset, focusing on the standardization of annotations and inter-annotator agreement across 12 evaluative questions concerning performance quality. We also explore the predictive relationship between audio features and teacher ratings via machine learning, as well as annotations provided for text analysis of the responses.

We investigate the problem of modeling symbolic sequences of polyphonic music in a completely general piano-roll representation. We introduce a probabilistic model based on distribution estimators conditioned on a recurrent neural network that is able to discover temporal dependencies in high-dimensional sequences. Our approach outperforms many traditional models of polyphonic music on a variety of realistic datasets. We show how our musical language model can serve as a symbolic prior to improve the accuracy of polyphonic transcription.

The field of automatic music composition has seen great progress in the last few years, much of which can be attributed to advances in deep neural networks. There are numerous studies that present different strategies for generating sheet music from scratch. The inclusion of high-level musical characteristics (e.g., perceived emotional qualities), however, as conditions for controlling the generation output remains a challenge. In this paper, we present a novel approach for calculating the valence (the positivity or negativity of the perceived emotion) of a chord progression within a lead sheet, using pre-defined mood tags proposed by music experts. Based on this approach, we propose a novel strategy for conditional lead sheet generation that allows us to steer the music generation in terms of valence, phrasing, and time signature. Our approach is similar to a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) problem, as we include high-level conditions in the encoder part of the sequence-to-sequence architectures used (i.e., long-short term memory networks, and a Transformer network). We conducted experiments to thoroughly analyze these two architectures. The results show that the proposed strategy is able to generate lead sheets in a controllable manner, resulting in distributions of musical attributes similar to those of the training dataset. We also verified through a subjective listening test that our approach is effective in controlling the valence of a generated chord progression.

Optical Music Recognition is a field that has progressed significantly, bringing accurate systems that transcribe effectively music scores into digital formats. Despite this, there are still several limitations that hinder OMR from achieving its full potential. Specifically, state of the art OMR still depends on multi-stage pipelines for performing full-page transcription, as well as it has only been demonstrated in monophonic cases, leaving behind very relevant engravings. In this work, we present the Sheet Music Transformer++, an end-to-end model that is able to transcribe full-page polyphonic music scores without the need of a previous Layout Analysis step. This is done thanks to an extensive curriculum learning-based pretraining with synthetic data generation. We conduct several experiments on a full-page extension of a public polyphonic transcription dataset. The experimental outcomes confirm that the model is competent at transcribing full-page pianoform scores, marking a noteworthy milestone in end-to-end OMR transcription.

Artwork analysis is important and fundamental skill for art appreciation, which could enrich personal aesthetic sensibility and facilitate the critical thinking ability. Understanding artworks is challenging due to its subjective nature, diverse interpretations, and complex visual elements, requiring expertise in art history, cultural background, and aesthetic theory. However, limited by the data collection and model ability, previous works for automatically analyzing artworks mainly focus on classification, retrieval, and other simple tasks, which is far from the goal of AI. To facilitate the research progress, in this paper, we step further to compose comprehensive analysis inspired by the remarkable perception and generation ability of large multimodal models. Specifically, we first propose a task of composing paragraph analysis for artworks, i.e., painting in this paper, only focusing on visual characteristics to formulate more comprehensive understanding of artworks. To support the research on formal analysis, we collect a large dataset PaintingForm, with about 19k painting images and 50k analysis paragraphs. We further introduce a superior large multimodal model for painting analysis composing, dubbed GalleryGPT, which is slightly modified and fine-tuned based on LLaVA architecture leveraging our collected data. We conduct formal analysis generation and zero-shot experiments across several datasets to assess the capacity of our model. The results show remarkable performance improvements comparing with powerful baseline LMMs, demonstrating its superb ability of art analysis and generalization. blue{The codes and model are available at: https://github.com/steven640pixel/GalleryGPT.

We demonstrate the efficacy of using intermediate representations from a single foundation model to enhance various music downstream tasks. We introduce SoniDo , a music foundation model (MFM) designed to extract hierarchical features from target music samples. By leveraging hierarchical intermediate features, SoniDo constrains the information granularity, leading to improved performance across various downstream tasks including both understanding and generative tasks. We specifically evaluated this approach on representative tasks such as music tagging, music transcription, music source separation, and music mixing. Our results reveal that the features extracted from foundation models provide valuable enhancements in training downstream task models. This highlights the capability of using features extracted from music foundation models as a booster for downstream tasks. Our approach not only benefits existing task-specific models but also supports music downstream tasks constrained by data scarcity. This paves the way for more effective and accessible music processing solutions.

Learning musical structures and composition patterns is necessary for both music generation and understanding, but current methods do not make uniform use of learned features to generate and comprehend music simultaneously. In this paper, we propose PianoBART, a pre-trained model that uses BART for both symbolic piano music generation and understanding. We devise a multi-level object selection strategy for different pre-training tasks of PianoBART, which can prevent information leakage or loss and enhance learning ability. The musical semantics captured in pre-training are fine-tuned for music generation and understanding tasks. Experiments demonstrate that PianoBART efficiently learns musical patterns and achieves outstanding performance in generating high-quality coherent pieces and comprehending music. Our code and supplementary material are available at https://github.com/RS2002/PianoBart.

Music structure analysis (MSA) underpins music understanding and controllable generation, yet progress has been limited by small, inconsistent corpora. We present SongFormer, a scalable framework that learns from heterogeneous supervision. SongFormer (i) fuses short- and long-window self-supervised audio representations to capture both fine-grained and long-range dependencies, and (ii) introduces a learned source embedding to enable training with partial, noisy, and schema-mismatched labels. To support scaling and fair evaluation, we release SongFormDB, the largest MSA corpus to date (over 10k tracks spanning languages and genres), and SongFormBench, a 300-song expert-verified benchmark. On SongFormBench, SongFormer sets a new state of the art in strict boundary detection (HR.5F) and achieves the highest functional label accuracy, while remaining computationally efficient; it surpasses strong baselines and Gemini 2.5 Pro on these metrics and remains competitive under relaxed tolerance (HR3F). Code, datasets, and model are publicly available.

Symbolic music evaluation for large language models remains fragmented across representations, datasets, and metrics. We introduce LilyBench, a LilyPond-based benchmark that jointly evaluates symbolic music generation and music understanding on the same family of open-weight LLMs. The benchmark includes a 200-prompt generation suite and ten understanding tasks adapted from ABC-Eval, covering syntax, metadata prediction, structural sequencing, and music recognition. Generation quality is evaluated using compile rate, MusPy descriptor distributions via Jensen-Shannon similarity, and LilyBERT-based Fréchet Music Distance (FMD). Experiments on four open-weight models show that executable LilyPond generation is achievable in zero-shot settings, while structural understanding tasks remain challenging despite strong performance on composer and genre recognition. Our experiments also reveal systematic disagreements between descriptor-based and embedding-based metrics, suggesting that symbolic music evaluation benefits from metric triangulation rather than single-score ranking. We release the benchmark, prompt bank, and evaluation code to support future research in symbolic music generation and understanding at https://github.com/CSCPadova/lilybench

Existing text-to-music models can produce high-quality audio with great diversity. However, textual prompts alone cannot precisely control temporal musical features such as chords and rhythm of the generated music. To address this challenge, we introduce MusiConGen, a temporally-conditioned Transformer-based text-to-music model that builds upon the pretrained MusicGen framework. Our innovation lies in an efficient finetuning mechanism, tailored for consumer-grade GPUs, that integrates automatically-extracted rhythm and chords as the condition signal. During inference, the condition can either be musical features extracted from a reference audio signal, or be user-defined symbolic chord sequence, BPM, and textual prompts. Our performance evaluation on two datasets -- one derived from extracted features and the other from user-created inputs -- demonstrates that MusiConGen can generate realistic backing track music that aligns well with the specified conditions. We open-source the code and model checkpoints, and provide audio examples online, https://musicongen.github.io/musicongen_demo/.

Several adaptations of Transformers models have been developed in various domains since its breakthrough in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This trend has spread into the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), including studies processing music data. However, the practice of leveraging NLP tools for symbolic music data is not novel in MIR. Music has been frequently compared to language, as they share several similarities, including sequential representations of text and music. These analogies are also reflected through similar tasks in MIR and NLP. This survey reviews NLP methods applied to symbolic music generation and information retrieval studies following two axes. We first propose an overview of representations of symbolic music adapted from natural language sequential representations. Such representations are designed by considering the specificities of symbolic music. These representations are then processed by models. Such models, possibly originally developed for text and adapted for symbolic music, are trained on various tasks. We describe these models, in particular deep learning models, through different prisms, highlighting music-specialized mechanisms. We finally present a discussion surrounding the effective use of NLP tools for symbolic music data. This includes technical issues regarding NLP methods and fundamental differences between text and music, which may open several doors for further research into more effectively adapting NLP tools to symbolic MIR.

Existing methods for expressive music performance rendering rely on supervised learning over small labeled datasets, which limits scaling of both data volume and model size, despite the availability of vast unlabeled music, as in vision and language. To address this gap, we introduce Pianist Transformer, with four key contributions: 1) a unified Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) data representation for learning the shared principles of musical structure and expression without explicit annotation; 2) an efficient asymmetric architecture, enabling longer contexts and faster inference without sacrificing rendering quality; 3) a self-supervised pre-training pipeline with 10B tokens and 135M-parameter model, unlocking data and model scaling advantages for expressive performance rendering; 4) a state-of-the-art performance model, which achieves strong objective metrics and human-level subjective ratings. Overall, Pianist Transformer establishes a scalable path toward human-like performance synthesis in the music domain.

While most music generation models use textual or parametric conditioning (e.g. tempo, harmony, musical genre), we propose to condition a language model based music generation system with audio input. Our exploration involves two distinct strategies. The first strategy, termed textual inversion, leverages a pre-trained text-to-music model to map audio input to corresponding "pseudowords" in the textual embedding space. For the second model we train a music language model from scratch jointly with a text conditioner and a quantized audio feature extractor. At inference time, we can mix textual and audio conditioning and balance them thanks to a novel double classifier free guidance method. We conduct automatic and human studies that validates our approach. We will release the code and we provide music samples on https://musicgenstyle.github.io in order to show the quality of our model.

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.

In the domain of symbolic music research, the progress of developing scalable systems has been notably hindered by the scarcity of available training data and the demand for models tailored to specific tasks. To address these issues, we propose MelodyT5, a novel unified framework that leverages an encoder-decoder architecture tailored for symbolic music processing in ABC notation. This framework challenges the conventional task-specific approach, considering various symbolic music tasks as score-to-score transformations. Consequently, it integrates seven melody-centric tasks, from generation to harmonization and segmentation, within a single model. Pre-trained on MelodyHub, a newly curated collection featuring over 261K unique melodies encoded in ABC notation and encompassing more than one million task instances, MelodyT5 demonstrates superior performance in symbolic music processing via multi-task transfer learning. Our findings highlight the efficacy of multi-task transfer learning in symbolic music processing, particularly for data-scarce tasks, challenging the prevailing task-specific paradigms and offering a comprehensive dataset and framework for future explorations in this domain.

Expressive performance rendering (EPR) aims to generate realistic performances constrained on sequences of notes. However, flow matching audio editing models manipulate only synchronized music samples of the same duration, limiting their understanding of expressive timing. We introduce PianoKontext, a flow matching rendering model for classical piano music that generates variable-length performances in the latent space of a pretrained Music2Latent model. We synthesize MIDI scores into deadpan audio and employ Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in the latent space to construct paired data for training. The aligned embeddings are concatenated in DiT blocks, allowing for a simple and effective learning of the dependencies between the score and performances. Audio samples are available at our demo page: https://realfolkcode.github.io/pianokontext_demo/.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in text generation, we find that their ability has yet to be generalized to music, humanity's creative language. We introduce ChatMusician, an open-source LLM that integrates intrinsic musical abilities. It is based on continual pre-training and finetuning LLaMA2 on a text-compatible music representation, ABC notation, and the music is treated as a second language. ChatMusician can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without any external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers. Interestingly, endowing musical abilities does not harm language abilities, even achieving a slightly higher MMLU score. Our model is capable of composing well-structured, full-length music, conditioned on texts, chords, melodies, motifs, musical forms, etc, surpassing GPT-4 baseline. On our meticulously curated college-level music understanding benchmark, MusicTheoryBench, ChatMusician surpasses LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5 on zero-shot setting by a noticeable margin. Our work reveals that LLMs can be an excellent compressor for music, but there remains significant territory to be conquered. We release our 4B token music-language corpora MusicPile, the collected MusicTheoryBench, code, model and demo in GitHub.

We propose a method to recommend music for an input video while allowing a user to guide music selection with free-form natural language. A key challenge of this problem setting is that existing music video datasets provide the needed (video, music) training pairs, but lack text descriptions of the music. This work addresses this challenge with the following three contributions. First, we propose a text-synthesis approach that relies on an analogy-based prompting procedure to generate natural language music descriptions from a large-scale language model (BLOOM-176B) given pre-trained music tagger outputs and a small number of human text descriptions. Second, we use these synthesized music descriptions to train a new trimodal model, which fuses text and video input representations to query music samples. For training, we introduce a text dropout regularization mechanism which we show is critical to model performance. Our model design allows for the retrieved music audio to agree with the two input modalities by matching visual style depicted in the video and musical genre, mood, or instrumentation described in the natural language query. Third, to evaluate our approach, we collect a testing dataset for our problem by annotating a subset of 4k clips from the YT8M-MusicVideo dataset with natural language music descriptions which we make publicly available. We show that our approach can match or exceed the performance of prior methods on video-to-music retrieval while significantly improving retrieval accuracy when using text guidance.

Rich internal representations of musical structure are essential for music understanding tasks such as machine-assisted music co-writing, yet self-supervised approaches for symbolic music representation remain underexplored, particularly those that encode the hierarchical multiscale nature of musical structures. We present MIDI-RAE-JEPA, combining a pitch- and time-shift equivariance objective with LeJEPA and a Swin Transformer V2 encoder to learn such hierarchical representations of symbolic music encoded as piano roll images. The time-shift equivariance objective encourages the model to internalize temporal musical relationships. The encoder is trained purely on self-supervised objectives -- including a masked embedding predictor (MEP) -- with collapse prevented via SIGReg. A separate decoder trained on the frozen encoder embeddings achieves reconstruction F1 of 0.995, and a flow matching generative model conditioned on those embeddings produces generations that closely match the pitch register and rhythmic density of the conditioning excerpt, while mismatched conditioning yields unrelated but musically plausible output. Learned representations outperform a Haar scattering transform baseline on a downstream emotion classification task, and embedding distances increase monotonically with pitch and time shift magnitude, confirming measurable equivariance. These results suggest that equivariance-based SSL objectives, combined with sufficient fine-level encoder capacity, provide a viable path toward semantically rich, generatively useful representations of symbolic music.

This paper presents an integrated system that transforms symbolic music scores into expressive piano performance audio. By combining a Transformer-based Expressive Performance Rendering (EPR) model with a fine-tuned neural MIDI synthesiser, our approach directly generates expressive audio performances from score inputs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system to offer a streamlined method for converting score MIDI files lacking expression control into rich, expressive piano performances. We conducted experiments using subsets of the ATEPP dataset, evaluating the system with both objective metrics and subjective listening tests. Our system not only accurately reconstructs human-like expressiveness, but also captures the acoustic ambience of environments such as concert halls and recording studios. Additionally, the proposed system demonstrates its ability to achieve musical expressiveness while ensuring good audio quality in its outputs.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently gained traction in symbolic music tasks, yet a lack of a unified framework impedes progress. Addressing this gap, we present GraphMuse, a graph processing framework and library that facilitates efficient music graph processing and GNN training for symbolic music tasks. Central to our contribution is a new neighbor sampling technique specifically targeted toward meaningful behavior in musical scores. Additionally, GraphMuse integrates hierarchical modeling elements that augment the expressivity and capabilities of graph networks for musical tasks. Experiments with two specific musical prediction tasks -- pitch spelling and cadence detection -- demonstrate significant performance improvement over previous methods. Our hope is that GraphMuse will lead to a boost in, and standardization of, symbolic music processing based on graph representations. The library is available at https://github.com/manoskary/graphmuse

The process of reconstructing experiences from human brain activity offers a unique lens into how the brain interprets and represents the world. In this paper, we introduce a method for reconstructing music from brain activity, captured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Our approach uses either music retrieval or the MusicLM music generation model conditioned on embeddings derived from fMRI data. The generated music resembles the musical stimuli that human subjects experienced, with respect to semantic properties like genre, instrumentation, and mood. We investigate the relationship between different components of MusicLM and brain activity through a voxel-wise encoding modeling analysis. Furthermore, we discuss which brain regions represent information derived from purely textual descriptions of music stimuli. We provide supplementary material including examples of the reconstructed music at https://google-research.github.io/seanet/brain2music

Text-to-Music Retrieval, finding music based on a given natural language query, plays a pivotal role in content discovery within extensive music databases. To address this challenge, prior research has predominantly focused on a joint embedding of music audio and text, utilizing it to retrieve music tracks that exactly match descriptive queries related to musical attributes (i.e. genre, instrument) and contextual elements (i.e. mood, theme). However, users also articulate a need to explore music that shares similarities with their favorite tracks or artists, such as I need a similar track to Superstition by Stevie Wonder. To address these concerns, this paper proposes an improved Text-to-Music Retrieval model, denoted as TTMR++, which utilizes rich text descriptions generated with a finetuned large language model and metadata. To accomplish this, we obtained various types of seed text from several existing music tag and caption datasets and a knowledge graph dataset of artists and tracks. The experimental results show the effectiveness of TTMR++ in comparison to state-of-the-art music-text joint embedding models through a comprehensive evaluation involving various musical text queries.

In the era of extensive intersection between art and Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as image generation and fiction co-creation, AI for music remains relatively nascent, particularly in music understanding. This is evident in the limited work on deep music representations, the scarcity of large-scale datasets, and the absence of a universal and community-driven benchmark. To address this issue, we introduce the Music Audio Representation Benchmark for universaL Evaluation, termed MARBLE. It aims to provide a benchmark for various Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks by defining a comprehensive taxonomy with four hierarchy levels, including acoustic, performance, score, and high-level description. We then establish a unified protocol based on 14 tasks on 8 public-available datasets, providing a fair and standard assessment of representations of all open-sourced pre-trained models developed on music recordings as baselines. Besides, MARBLE offers an easy-to-use, extendable, and reproducible suite for the community, with a clear statement on copyright issues on datasets. Results suggest recently proposed large-scale pre-trained musical language models perform the best in most tasks, with room for further improvement. The leaderboard and toolkit repository are published at https://marble-bm.shef.ac.uk to promote future music AI research.

Graphs can be leveraged to model polyphonic multitrack symbolic music, where notes, chords and entire sections may be linked at different levels of the musical hierarchy by tonal and rhythmic relationships. Nonetheless, there is a lack of works that consider graph representations in the context of deep learning systems for music generation. This paper bridges this gap by introducing a novel graph representation for music and a deep Variational Autoencoder that generates the structure and the content of musical graphs separately, one after the other, with a hierarchical architecture that matches the structural priors of music. By separating the structure and content of musical graphs, it is possible to condition generation by specifying which instruments are played at certain times. This opens the door to a new form of human-computer interaction in the context of music co-creation. After training the model on existing MIDI datasets, the experiments show that the model is able to generate appealing short and long musical sequences and to realistically interpolate between them, producing music that is tonally and rhythmically consistent. Finally, the visualization of the embeddings shows that the model is able to organize its latent space in accordance with known musical concepts.

Automatic music transcription (AMT) has achieved high accuracy for piano due to the availability of large, high-quality datasets such as MAESTRO and MAPS, but comparable datasets are not yet available for other instruments. In recent work, however, it has been demonstrated that aligning scores to transcription model activations can produce high quality AMT training data for instruments other than piano. Focusing on the guitar, we refine this approach to training on score data using a dataset of commercially available score-audio pairs. We propose the use of a high-resolution piano transcription model to train a new guitar transcription model. The resulting model obtains state-of-the-art transcription results on GuitarSet in a zero-shot context, improving on previously published methods.

The multimodal nature of music performance has driven increasing interest in data beyond the audio domain within the music information retrieval (MIR) community. This paper introduces PianoVAM, a comprehensive piano performance dataset that includes videos, audio, MIDI, hand landmarks, fingering labels, and rich metadata. The dataset was recorded using a Disklavier piano, capturing audio and MIDI from amateur pianists during their daily practice sessions, alongside synchronized top-view videos in realistic and varied performance conditions. Hand landmarks and fingering labels were extracted using a pretrained hand pose estimation model and a semi-automated fingering annotation algorithm. We discuss the challenges encountered during data collection and the alignment process across different modalities. Additionally, we describe our fingering annotation method based on hand landmarks extracted from videos. Finally, we present benchmarking results for both audio-only and audio-visual piano transcription using the PianoVAM dataset and discuss additional potential applications.

Many applications of cross-modal music retrieval are related to connecting sheet music images to audio recordings. A typical and recent approach to this is to learn, via deep neural networks, a joint embedding space that correlates short fixed-size snippets of audio and sheet music by means of an appropriate similarity structure. However, two challenges that arise out of this strategy are the requirement of strongly aligned data to train the networks, and the inherent discrepancies of musical content between audio and sheet music snippets caused by local and global tempo differences. In this paper, we address these two shortcomings by designing a cross-modal recurrent network that learns joint embeddings that can summarize longer passages of corresponding audio and sheet music. The benefits of our method are that it only requires weakly aligned audio-sheet music pairs, as well as that the recurrent network handles the non-linearities caused by tempo variations between audio and sheet music. We conduct a number of experiments on synthetic and real piano data and scores, showing that our proposed recurrent method leads to more accurate retrieval in all possible configurations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming very popular and are used for many different purposes, including creative tasks in the arts. However, these models sometimes have trouble with specific reasoning tasks, especially those that involve logical thinking and counting. This paper looks at how well LLMs understand and reason when dealing with musical tasks like figuring out notes from intervals and identifying chords and scales. We tested GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o to see how they handle these tasks. Our results show that while LLMs do well with note intervals, they struggle with more complicated tasks like recognizing chords and scales. This points out clear limits in current LLM abilities and shows where we need to make them better, which could help improve how they think and work in both artistic and other complex areas. We also provide an automatically generated benchmark data set for the described tasks.

Music performance synthesis aims to synthesize a musical score into a natural performance. In this paper, we borrow recent advances in text-to-speech synthesis and present the Deep Performer -- a novel system for score-to-audio music performance synthesis. Unlike speech, music often contains polyphony and long notes. Hence, we propose two new techniques for handling polyphonic inputs and providing a fine-grained conditioning in a transformer encoder-decoder model. To train our proposed system, we present a new violin dataset consisting of paired recordings and scores along with estimated alignments between them. We show that our proposed model can synthesize music with clear polyphony and harmonic structures. In a listening test, we achieve competitive quality against the baseline model, a conditional generative audio model, in terms of pitch accuracy, timbre and noise level. Moreover, our proposed model significantly outperforms the baseline on an existing piano dataset in overall quality.

A range of applications of multi-modal music information retrieval is centred around the problem of connecting large collections of sheet music (images) to corresponding audio recordings, that is, identifying pairs of audio and score excerpts that refer to the same musical content. One of the typical and most recent approaches to this task employs cross-modal deep learning architectures to learn joint embedding spaces that link the two distinct modalities - audio and sheet music images. While there has been steady improvement on this front over the past years, a number of open problems still prevent large-scale employment of this methodology. In this article we attempt to provide an insightful examination of the current developments on audio-sheet music retrieval via deep learning methods. We first identify a set of main challenges on the road towards robust and large-scale cross-modal music retrieval in real scenarios. We then highlight the steps we have taken so far to address some of these challenges, documenting step-by-step improvement along several dimensions. We conclude by analysing the remaining challenges and present ideas for solving these, in order to pave the way to a unified and robust methodology for cross-modal music retrieval.

Recently, symbolic music generation has become a focus of numerous deep learning research. Structure as an important part of music, contributes to improving the quality of music, and an increasing number of works start to study the hierarchical structure. In this study, we delve into the multi-level structures within music from macro-level and micro-level hierarchies. At the macro-level hierarchy, we conduct phrase segmentation algorithm to explore how phrases influence the overall development of music, and at the micro-level hierarchy, we design skeleton notes extraction strategy to explore how skeleton notes within each phrase guide the melody generation. Furthermore, we propose a novel Phrase-level Cross-Attention mechanism to capture the intrinsic relationship between macro-level hierarchy and micro-level hierarchy. Moreover, in response to the current lack of research on Chinese-style music, we construct our Small Tunes Dataset: a substantial collection of MIDI files comprising 10088 Small Tunes, a category of traditional Chinese Folk Songs. This dataset serves as the focus of our study. We generate Small Tunes songs utilizing the extracted skeleton notes as conditions, and experiment results indicate that our proposed model, Small Tunes Transformer, outperforms other state-of-the-art models. Besides, we design three novel objective evaluation metrics to evaluate music from both rhythm and melody dimensions.