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Large-scale text-to-music generation models have significantly enhanced music creation capabilities, offering unprecedented creative freedom. However, their ability to collaborate effectively with human musicians remains limited. In this paper, we propose a framework to describe the musical interaction process, which includes expression, interpretation, and execution of controls. Following this framework, we argue that the primary gap between existing text-to-music models and musicians lies in the interpretation stage, where models lack the ability to interpret controls from musicians. We also propose two strategies to address this gap and call on the music information retrieval community to tackle the interpretation challenge to improve human-AI musical collaboration., Comment: Under review

Recent advances in text-to-music editing, which employ text queries to modify music (e.g.\ by changing its style or adjusting instrumental components), present unique challenges and opportunities for AI-assisted music creation. Previous approaches in this domain have been constrained by the necessity to train specific editing models from scratch, which is both resource-intensive and inefficient; other research uses large language models to predict edited music, resulting in imprecise audio reconstruction. To Combine the strengths and address these limitations, we introduce Instruct-MusicGen, a novel approach that finetunes a pretrained MusicGen model to efficiently follow editing instructions such as adding, removing, or separating stems. Our approach involves a modification of the original MusicGen architecture by incorporating a text fusion module and an audio fusion module, which allow the model to process instruction texts and audio inputs concurrently and yield the desired edited music. Remarkably, Instruct-MusicGen only introduces 8% new parameters to the original MusicGen model and only trains for 5K steps, yet it achieves superior performance across all tasks compared to existing baselines, and demonstrates performance comparable to the models trained for specific tasks. This advancement not only enhances the efficiency of text-to-music editing but also broadens the applicability of music language models in dynamic music production environments., Comment: Code and demo are available at: https://github.com/ldzhangyx/instruct-musicgen

Controllable music generation plays a vital role in human-AI music co-creation. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating high-quality music, their focus on autoregressive generation limits their utility in music editing tasks. To address this gap, we propose a novel approach leveraging a parameter-efficient heterogeneous adapter combined with a masking training scheme. This approach enables autoregressive language models to seamlessly address music inpainting tasks. Additionally, our method integrates frame-level content-based controls, facilitating track-conditioned music refinement and score-conditioned music arrangement. We apply this method to fine-tune MusicGen, a leading autoregressive music generation model. Our experiments demonstrate promising results across multiple music editing tasks, offering more flexible controls for future AI-driven music editing tools. The source codes and a demo page showcasing our work are available at https://kikyo-16.github.io/AIR.

Recent advances in text-to-music generation models have opened new avenues in musical creativity. However, music generation usually involves iterative refinements, and how to edit the generated music remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces a novel approach to the editing of music generated by such models, enabling the modification of specific attributes, such as genre, mood and instrument, while maintaining other aspects unchanged. Our method transforms text editing to \textit{latent space manipulation} while adding an extra constraint to enforce consistency. It seamlessly integrates with existing pretrained text-to-music diffusion models without requiring additional training. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance over both zero-shot and certain supervised baselines in style and timbre transfer evaluations. Additionally, we showcase the practical applicability of our approach in real-world music editing scenarios., Comment: Accepted to IJCAI 2024

We introduce the Song Describer dataset (SDD), a new crowdsourced corpus of high-quality audio-caption pairs, designed for the evaluation of music-and-language models. The dataset consists of 1.1k human-written natural language descriptions of 706 music recordings, all publicly accessible and released under Creative Common licenses. To showcase the use of our dataset, we benchmark popular models on three key music-and-language tasks (music captioning, text-to-music generation and music-language retrieval). Our experiments highlight the importance of cross-dataset evaluation and offer insights into how researchers can use SDD to gain a broader understanding of model performance., Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Machine Learning for Audio

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth of large-scale language models in the domain of music audio. Such models enable end-to-end generation of higher-quality music, and some allow conditioned generation using text descriptions. However, the control power of text controls on music is intrinsically limited, as they can only describe music indirectly through meta-data (such as singers and instruments) or high-level representations (such as genre and emotion). We aim to further equip the models with direct and content-based controls on innate music languages such as pitch, chords and drum track. To this end, we contribute Coco-Mulla, a content-based control method for music large language modeling. It uses a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method tailored for Transformer-based audio models. Experiments show that our approach achieved high-quality music generation with low-resource semi-supervised learning, tuning with less than 4% parameters compared to the original model and training on a small dataset with fewer than 300 songs. Moreover, our approach enables effective content-based controls, and we illustrate the control power via chords and rhythms, two of the most salient features of music audio. Furthermore, we show that by combining content-based controls and text descriptions, our system achieves flexible music variation generation and arrangement. Our source codes and demos are available online.

Creating music is iterative, requiring varied methods at each stage. However, existing AI music systems fall short in orchestrating multiple subsystems for diverse needs. To address this gap, we introduce Loop Copilot, a novel system that enables users to generate and iteratively refine music through an interactive, multi-round dialogue interface. The system uses a large language model to interpret user intentions and select appropriate AI models for task execution. Each backend model is specialized for a specific task, and their outputs are aggregated to meet the user's requirements. To ensure musical coherence, essential attributes are maintained in a centralized table. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, highlighting its utility not only in facilitating music creation but also its potential for broader applications., Comment: Source code and demo video are available at \url{https://sites.google.com/view/loop-copilot}

In this study, we explore the representation mapping from the domain of visual arts to the domain of music, with which we can use visual arts as an effective handle to control music generation. Unlike most studies in multimodal representation learning that are purely data-driven, we adopt an analysis-by-synthesis approach that combines deep music representation learning with user studies. Such an approach enables us to discover \textit{interpretable} representation mapping without a huge amount of paired data. In particular, we discover that visual-to-music mapping has a nice property similar to equivariant. In other words, we can use various image transformations, say, changing brightness, changing contrast, style transfer, to control the corresponding transformations in the music domain. In addition, we released the Vis2Mus system as a controllable interface for symbolic music generation., Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 2023. GitHub repo: https://github.com/ldzhangyx/vis2mus

Music contains hierarchical structures beyond beats and measures. While hierarchical structure annotations are helpful for music information retrieval and computer musicology, such annotations are scarce in current digital music databases. In this paper, we explore a data-driven approach to automatically extract hierarchical metrical structures from scores. We propose a new model with a Temporal Convolutional Network-Conditional Random Field (TCN-CRF) architecture. Given a symbolic music score, our model takes in an arbitrary number of voices in a beat-quantized form, and predicts a 4-level hierarchical metrical structure from downbeat-level to section-level. We also annotate a dataset using RWC-POP MIDI files to facilitate training and evaluation. We show by experiments that the proposed method performs better than the rule-based approach under different orchestration settings. We also perform some simple musicological analysis on the model predictions. All demos, datasets and pre-trained models are publicly available on Github., Comment: Accepted at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), 2022

Lyric interpretations can help people understand songs and their lyrics quickly, and can also make it easier to manage, retrieve and discover songs efficiently from the growing mass of music archives. In this paper we propose BART-fusion, a novel model for generating lyric interpretations from lyrics and music audio that combines a large-scale pre-trained language model with an audio encoder. We employ a cross-modal attention module to incorporate the audio representation into the lyrics representation to help the pre-trained language model understand the song from an audio perspective, while preserving the language model's original generative performance. We also release the Song Interpretation Dataset, a new large-scale dataset for training and evaluating our model. Experimental results show that the additional audio information helps our model to understand words and music better, and to generate precise and fluent interpretations. An additional experiment on cross-modal music retrieval shows that interpretations generated by BART-fusion can also help people retrieve music more accurately than with the original BART., Comment: Accepted to ISMIR 2022

While deep generative models have become the leading methods for algorithmic composition, it remains a challenging problem to control the generation process because the latent variables of most deep-learning models lack good interpretability. Inspired by the content-style disentanglement idea, we design a novel architecture, under the VAE framework, that effectively learns two interpretable latent factors of polyphonic music: chord and texture. The current model focuses on learning 8-beat long piano composition segments. We show that such chord-texture disentanglement provides a controllable generation pathway leading to a wide spectrum of applications, including compositional style transfer, texture variation, and accompaniment arrangement. Both objective and subjective evaluations show that our method achieves a successful disentanglement and high quality controlled music generation.

The dominant approach for music representation learning involves the deep unsupervised model family variational autoencoder (VAE). However, most, if not all, viable attempts on this problem have largely been limited to monophonic music. Normally composed of richer modality and more complex musical structures, the polyphonic counterpart has yet to be addressed in the context of music representation learning. In this work, we propose the PianoTree VAE, a novel tree-structure extension upon VAE aiming to fit the polyphonic music learning. The experiments prove the validity of the PianoTree VAE via (i)-semantically meaningful latent code for polyphonic segments; (ii)-more satisfiable reconstruction aside of decent geometry learned in the latent space; (iii)-this model's benefits to the variety of the downstream music generation.