Chord-Conditioned Melody Harmonization with Controllable Harmonicity
This provides an assistive compositional tool for musicians, but it is incremental as it builds on existing melody harmonization work.
The paper tackles melody harmonization by proposing DeepChoir, a system that generates four-part chorales for a given melody conditioned on chord progressions with controllable harmonicity, showing effectiveness in experiments.
Melody harmonization has long been closely associated with chorales composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Previous works rarely emphasised chorale generation conditioned on chord progressions, and there has been a lack of focus on assistive compositional tools. In this paper, we first designed a music representation that encoded chord symbols for chord conditioning, and then proposed DeepChoir, a melody harmonization system that can generate a four-part chorale for a given melody conditioned on a chord progression. With controllable harmonicity, users can control the extent of harmonicity for generated chorales. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the music representation and the controllability of DeepChoir.