Publications

Controllable deep melody generation via hierarchical music representation

International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference

Publication date: November 8, 2021

Shuqi Dai, Zeyu Jin, Celso Gomes, Roger B. Dannenberg

Recent advances in deep learning have expanded possibilities to generate music, but generating a customizable full piece of music with consistent long-term structures remains a challenge. This paper introduces a hierarchical music representation called Music Frameworks, and a multi-step generative process to create a full-length melody guided by long-term repetitive structure, chord, melodic contour, and rhythm constraints. To generate the melody, we first generate rhythm and basic melody using two separate transformer-based networks. Then, another transformer-based network generates the melody conditioned on the basic melody, rhythm, and chords in an auto-regressive manner. To customize, one can alter chords, basic melody, and rhythm while our networks generate the melody accordingly. Evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in writing a completely new melody and rhythm given chords. 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.


Research Area:  Adobe Research iconAudio