Shuqi Dai

Yinghao Ma, Anders Øland, Anton Ragni et al.

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.

Nikolas McNeal, Jennifer Huang, Aniekan Umoren et al.

We explore the use of a neural network inspired by predictive coding for modeling human music perception. This network was developed based on the computational neuroscience theory of recurrent interactions in the hierarchical visual cortex. When trained with video data using self-supervised learning, the model manifests behaviors consistent with human visual illusions. Here, we adapt this network to model the hierarchical auditory system and investigate whether it will make similar choices to humans regarding the musicality of a set of random pitch sequences. When the model is trained with a large corpus of instrumental classical music and popular melodies rendered as mel spectrograms, it exhibits greater prediction errors for random pitch sequences that are rated less musical by human subjects. We found that the prediction error depends on the amount of information regarding the subsequent note, the pitch interval, and the temporal context. Our findings suggest that predictability is correlated with human perception of musicality and that a predictive coding neural network trained on music can be used to characterize the features and motifs contributing to human perception of music.

Shuqi Dai, Zeyu Jin, Celso Gomes et al.

Recent advances in deep learning have expanded possibilities to generate music, but generating a customizable full piece of music with consistent long-term structure remains a challenge. This paper introduces MusicFrameworks, a hierarchical music structure representation and a multi-step generative process to create a full-length melody guided by long-term repetitive structure, chord, melodic contour, and rhythm constraints. We first organize the full melody with section and phrase-level structure. To generate melody in each phrase, we generate rhythm and basic melody using two separate transformer-based networks, and then generate the melody conditioned on the basic melody, rhythm and chords in an auto-regressive manner. By factoring music generation into sub-problems, our approach allows simpler models and requires less data. To customize or add variety, one can alter chords, basic melody, and rhythm structure in the music frameworks, letting our networks generate the melody accordingly. Additionally, we introduce new features to encode musical positional information, rhythm patterns, and melodic contours based on musical domain knowledge. A listening test reveals that melodies generated by our method are rated as good as or better than human-composed music in the POP909 dataset about half the time.

Shuqi Dai, Xichu Ma, Ye Wang et al.

Many practices have been presented in music generation recently. While stylistic music generation using deep learning techniques has became the main stream, these models still struggle to generate music with high musicality, different levels of music structure, and controllability. In addition, more application scenarios such as music therapy require imitating more specific musical styles from a few given music examples, rather than capturing the overall genre style of a large data corpus. To address requirements that challenge current deep learning methods, we propose a statistical machine learning model that is able to capture and imitate the structure, melody, chord, and bass style from a given example seed song. An evaluation using 10 pop songs shows that our new representations and methods are able to create high-quality stylistic music that is similar to a given input song. We also discuss potential uses of our approach in music evaluation and music therapy.

Shuqi Dai, Huan Zhang, Roger B. Dannenberg

Repetition is a basic indicator of musical structure. This study introduces new algorithms for identifying musical phrases based on repetition. Phrases combine to form sections yielding a two-level hierarchical structure. Automatically detected hierarchical repetition structures reveal significant interactions between structure and chord progressions, melody and rhythm. Different levels of hierarchy interact differently, providing evidence that structural hierarchy plays an important role in music beyond simple notions of repetition or similarity. Our work suggests new applications for music generation and music evaluation.

Ziyu Wang, Ke Chen, Junyan Jiang et al.

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.

Shuqi Dai, Zheng Zhang, Gus G. Xia

Led by the success of neural style transfer on visual arts, there has been a rising trend very recently in the effort of music style transfer. However, "music style" is not yet a well-defined concept from a scientific point of view. The difficulty lies in the intrinsic multi-level and multi-modal character of music representation (which is very different from image representation). As a result, depending on their interpretation of "music style", current studies under the category of "music style transfer", are actually solving completely different problems that belong to a variety of sub-fields of Computer Music. Also, a vanilla end-to-end approach, which aims at dealing with all levels of music representation at once by directly adopting the method of image style transfer, leads to poor results. Thus, we vitally propose a more scientifically-viable definition of music style transfer by breaking it down into precise concepts of timbre style transfer, performance style transfer and composition style transfer, as well as to connect different aspects of music style transfer with existing well-established sub-fields of computer music studies. In addition, we discuss the current limitations of music style modeling and its future directions by drawing spirit from some deep generative models, especially the ones using unsupervised learning and disentanglement techniques.