Large Language Models' Internal Perception of Symbolic Music
This addresses the problem of understanding LLMs' capabilities in non-linguistic symbolic domains for researchers in AI and music, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM applications.
The paper investigated whether large language models (LLMs) can implicitly model symbolic music by generating MIDI files from text prompts and using them to train neural networks for tasks like genre classification and melody completion, showing that LLMs can infer basic musical structures but have limitations due to lack of explicit musical context.
Large language models (LLMs) excel at modeling relationships between strings in natural language and have shown promise in extending to other symbolic domains like coding or mathematics. However, the extent to which they implicitly model symbolic music remains underexplored. This paper investigates how LLMs represent musical concepts by generating symbolic music data from textual prompts describing combinations of genres and styles, and evaluating their utility through recognition and generation tasks. We produce a dataset of LLM-generated MIDI files without relying on explicit musical training. We then train neural networks entirely on this LLM-generated MIDI dataset and perform genre and style classification as well as melody completion, benchmarking their performance against established models. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can infer rudimentary musical structures and temporal relationships from text, highlighting both their potential to implicitly encode musical patterns and their limitations due to a lack of explicit musical context, shedding light on their generative capabilities for symbolic music.