Steer-by-prior Editing of Symbolic Music Loops

With the goal of building a system capable of controllable symbolic music loop generation and editing, this paper explores a generalisation of Masked Language Modelling we call Superposed Language Modelling. Rather than input tokens being known or unknown, a Superposed Language Model takes priors over the sequence as input, enabling us to apply various constraints to the generation at inference time. After detailing our approach, we demonstrate our model across various editing tasks in the domain of multi-instrument MIDI loops. We end by highlighting some limitations of the approach and avenues for future work. We provides examples from the SLM across multiple generation and editing tasks at https://erl-j.github.io/slm-mml-demo/.
Comment: Accepted to MML 2024