Xichu Ma

Longshen Ou, Xichu Ma, Ye Wang

Despite progress in melody-to-lyric generation, a substantial singability gap remains between machine-generated lyrics and those written by human lyricists. In this work, we aim to narrow this gap by jointly learning both wording and formatting for melody-to-lyric generation. After general-domain pretraining, our model acquires length awareness through an self-supervised stage trained on a large text-only lyric corpus. During supervised melody-to-lyric training, we introduce multiple auxiliary supervision objective informed by musicological findings on melody--lyric relationships, encouraging the model to capture fine-grained prosodic and structural patterns. Compared with naïve fine-tuning, our approach improves adherence to line-count and syllable-count requirements by 3.8% and 21.4% absolute, respectively, without degrading text quality. In human evaluation, it achieves 42.2% and 74.2% relative gains in overall quality over two task-specific baselines, underscoring the importance of formatting-aware training for generating singable lyrics.

Longshen Ou, Xichu Ma, Min-Yen Kan et al.

The development of general-domain neural machine translation (NMT) methods has advanced significantly in recent years, but the lack of naturalness and musical constraints in the outputs makes them unable to produce singable lyric translations. This paper bridges the singability quality gap by formalizing lyric translation into a constrained translation problem, converting theoretical guidance and practical techniques from translatology literature to prompt-driven NMT approaches, exploring better adaptation methods, and instantiating them to an English-Chinese lyric translation system. Our model achieves 99.85%, 99.00%, and 95.52% on length accuracy, rhyme accuracy, and word boundary recall. In our subjective evaluation, our model shows a 75% relative enhancement on overall quality, compared against naive fine-tuning (Code available at https://github.com/Sonata165/ControllableLyricTranslation).

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.