Loreto Parisi

Nikola I. Nikolov, Eric Malmi, Curtis G. Northcutt et al.

The ability to combine symbols to generate language is a defining characteristic of human intelligence, particularly in the context of artistic story-telling through lyrics. We develop a method for synthesizing a rap verse based on the content of any text (e.g., a news article), or for augmenting pre-existing rap lyrics. Our method, called Rapformer, is based on training a Transformer-based denoising autoencoder to reconstruct rap lyrics from content words extracted from the lyrics, trying to preserve the essential meaning, while matching the target style. Rapformer features a novel BERT-based paraphrasing scheme for rhyme enhancement which increases the average rhyme density of output lyrics by 10%. Experimental results on three diverse input domains show that Rapformer is capable of generating technically fluent verses that offer a good trade-off between content preservation and style transfer. Furthermore, a Turing-test-like experiment reveals that Rapformer fools human lyrics experts 25% of the time.

Loreto Parisi, Simone Francia, Silvio Olivastri et al.

One of the key points in music recommendation is authoring engaging playlists according to sentiment and emotions. While previous works were mostly based on audio for music discovery and playlists generation, we take advantage of our synchronized lyrics dataset to combine text representations and music features in a novel way; we therefore introduce the Synchronized Lyrics Emotion Dataset. Unlike other approaches that randomly exploited the audio samples and the whole text, our data is split according to the temporal information provided by the synchronization between lyrics and audio. This work shows a comparison between text-based and audio-based deep learning classification models using different techniques from Natural Language Processing and Music Information Retrieval domains. From the experiments on audio we conclude that using vocals only, instead of the whole audio data improves the overall performances of the audio classifier. In the lyrics experiments we exploit the state-of-the-art word representations applied to the main Deep Learning architectures available in literature. In our benchmarks the results show how the Bilinear LSTM classifier with Attention based on fastText word embedding performs better than the CNN applied on audio.