We investigate the problem of modeling symbolic sequences of polyphonic music in a completely general piano-roll representation. We introduce a probabilistic model based on distribution estimators conditioned on a recurrent neural network that is able to discover temporal dependencies in high-dimensional sequences. Our approach outperforms many traditional models of polyphonic music on a variety of realistic datasets. We show how our musical language model can serve as a symbolic prior to improve the accuracy of polyphonic transcription.
We present a supervised neural network model for polyphonic piano music transcription. The architecture of the proposed model is analogous to speech recognition systems and comprises an acoustic model and a music language model. The acoustic model is a neural network used for estimating the probabilities of pitches in a frame of audio. The language model is a recurrent neural network that models the correlations between pitch combinations over time. The proposed model is general and can be used to transcribe polyphonic music without imposing any constraints on the polyphony. The acoustic and l…
Instrument classification is one of the fields in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) that has attracted a lot of research interest. However, the majority of that is dealing with monophonic music, while efforts on polyphonic material mainly focus on predominant instrument recognition. In this paper, we propose an approach for instrument classification in polyphonic music from purely monophonic data, that involves performing data augmentation by mixing different audio segments. A variety of data augmentation techniques focusing on different sonic aspects, such as overlaying audio segments of the …
NYU Shanghai（纽约大学上海分校）；New York University（纽约大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
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 vi…
U.I. for Computing Research（计算研究所）；University of Alicante（阿利坎特大学）
We present a framework based on neural networks to extract music scores directly from polyphonic audio in an end-to-end fashion. Most previous Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) methods seek a piano-roll representation of the pitches, that can be further transformed into a score by incorporating tempo estimation, beat tracking, key estimation or rhythm quantization. Unlike these methods, our approach generates music notation directly from the input audio in a single stage. For this, we use a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss fu…
Centre for Digital Music（数字音乐中心）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
Automatic music transcription (AMT) aims to infer a latent symbolic representation of a piece of music (piano-roll), given a corresponding observed audio recording. Transcribing polyphonic music (when multiple notes are played simultaneously) is a challenging problem, due to highly structured overlapping between harmonics. We study whether the introduction of physically inspired Gaussian process (GP) priors into audio content analysis models improves the extraction of patterns required for AMT. Audio signals are described as a linear combination of sources. Each source is decomposed into the p…
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI)（奥地利人工智能研究所）；Institute of Computational Perception, Johannes Kepler University Linz（约翰内斯·开普勒大学林茨分校计算感知研究所）
We explore a novel way of conceptualising the task of polyphonic music transcription, using so-called invertible neural networks. Invertible models unify both discriminative and generative aspects in one function, sharing one set of parameters. Introducing invertibility enables the practitioner to directly inspect what the discriminative model has learned, and exactly determine which inputs lead to which outputs. For the task of transcribing polyphonic audio into symbolic form, these models may be especially useful as they allow us to observe, for instance, to what extent the concept of single…
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 g…
Traditional methods to tackle many music information retrieval tasks typically follow a two-step architecture: feature engineering followed by a simple learning algorithm. In these "shallow" architectures, feature engineering and learning are typically disjoint and unrelated. Additionally, feature engineering is difficult, and typically depends on extensive domain expertise. In this paper, we present an application of convolutional neural networks for the task of automatic musical instrument identification. In this model, feature extraction and learning algorithms are trained together in an en…
Detecting singing-voice in polyphonic instrumental music is critical to music information retrieval. To train a robust vocal detector, a large dataset marked with vocal or non-vocal label at frame-level is essential. However, frame-level labeling is time-consuming and labor expensive, resulting there is little well-labeled dataset available for singing-voice detection (S-VD). Hence, we propose a data augmentation method for S-VD by transfer learning. In this study, clean speech clips with voice activity endpoints and separate instrumental music clips are artificially added together to simulate…
We present in this paper a new approach for polyphonic music transcription using evolution strategies (ES). Automatic music transcription is a complex process that still remains an open challenge. Using an audio signal to be transcribed as target for our ES, information needed to generate a MIDI file can be extracted from this latter one. Many techniques presented in the literature at present exist and a few of them have applied evolutionary algorithms to address this problem in the context of considering it as a search space problem. However, ES have never been applied until now. The experime…
Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) has been recognized as a key enabling technology with a wide range of applications. Given the task's complexity, best results have typically been reported for systems focusing on specific settings, e.g. instrument-specific systems tend to yield improved results over instrument-agnostic methods. Similarly, higher accuracy can be obtained when only estimating frame-wise $f_0$ values and neglecting the harder note event detection. Despite their high accuracy, such specialized systems often cannot be deployed in the real-world. Storage and network constraints pr…
Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Paris（索尼计算机科学实验室（巴黎））；LIP6, Université Pierre et Marie Curie（皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学LIP6实验室）
Modeling polyphonic music is a particularly challenging task because of the intricate interplay between melody and harmony. A good model should satisfy three requirements: statistical accuracy (capturing faithfully the statistics of correlations at various ranges, horizontally and vertically), flexibility (coping with arbitrary user constraints), and generalization capacity (inventing new material, while staying in the style of the training corpus). Models proposed so far fail on at least one of these requirements. We propose a statistical model of polyphonic music, based on the maximum entrop…
We propose an application of sequence generative adversarial networks (SeqGAN), which are generative adversarial networks for discrete sequence generation, for creating polyphonic musical sequences. Instead of a monophonic melody generation suggested in the original work, we present an efficient representation of a polyphony MIDI file that simultaneously captures chords and melodies with dynamic timings. The proposed method condenses duration, octaves, and keys of both melodies and chords into a single word vector representation, and recurrent neural networks learn to predict distributions of …
Automatic note-level transcription is considered one of the most challenging tasks in music information retrieval. The specific case of flamenco singing transcription poses a particular challenge due to its complex melodic progressions, intonation inaccuracies, the use of a high degree of ornamentation and the presence of guitar accompaniment. In this study, we explore the limitations of existing state of the art transcription systems for the case of flamenco singing and propose a specific solution for this genre: We first extract the predominant melody and apply a novel contour filtering proc…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
Singing voice detection (SVD), to recognize vocal parts in the song, is an essential task in music information retrieval (MIR). The task remains challenging since singing voice varies and intertwines with the accompaniment music, especially for some complicated polyphonic music such as choral music recordings. To address this problem, we investigate singing voice detection while discarding the interference from the accompaniment. The proposed SVD has two steps: i. The singing voice separation (SVS) technique is first utilized to filter out the singing voice's potential part coarsely. ii. Upon …
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Advanced Institutes of Convergence Technology（融合技术先进研究院）
Identifying musical instruments in polyphonic music recordings is a challenging but important problem in the field of music information retrieval. It enables music search by instrument, helps recognize musical genres, or can make music transcription easier and more accurate. In this paper, we present a convolutional neural network framework for predominant instrument recognition in real-world polyphonic music. We train our network from fixed-length music excerpts with a single-labeled predominant instrument and estimate an arbitrary number of predominant instruments from an audio signal with a…
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence（奥地利人工智能研究所）；Johannes Kepler University（约翰内斯·开普勒大学）
We introduce a method for imposing higher-level structure on generated, polyphonic music. A Convolutional Restricted Boltzmann Machine (C-RBM) as a generative model is combined with gradient descent constraint optimisation to provide further control over the generation process. Among other things, this allows for the use of a "template" piece, from which some structural properties can be extracted, and transferred as constraints to the newly generated material. The sampling process is guided with Simulated Annealing to avoid local optima, and to find solutions that both satisfy the constraints…
A key aspect of machine learning models lies in their ability to learn efficient intermediate features. However, the input representation plays a crucial role in this process, and polyphonic musical scores remain a particularly complex type of information. In this paper, we introduce a novel representation of symbolic music data, which transforms a polyphonic score into a continuous signal. We evaluate the ability to learn meaningful features from this representation from a musical point of view. Hence, we introduce an evaluation method relying on principled generation of synthetic data. Final…
This paper presents a new approach in understanding how deep neural networks (DNNs) work by applying homomorphic signal processing techniques. Focusing on the task of multi-pitch estimation (MPE), this paper demonstrates the equivalence relation between a generalized cepstrum and a DNN in terms of their structures and functionality. Such an equivalence relation, together with pitch perception theories and the recently established rectified-correlations-on-a-sphere (RECOS) filter analysis, provide an alternative way in explaining the role of the nonlinear activation function and the multi-layer…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；INRS-EMT（加拿大国家科学研究院-能源材料电信研究所）；Kingston University（金斯顿大学）；Ghent University（根特大学）
We apply deep learning methods, specifically long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, to music transcription modelling and composition. We build and train LSTM networks using approximately 23,000 music transcriptions expressed with a high-level vocabulary (ABC notation), and use them to generate new transcriptions. Our practical aim is to create music transcription models useful in particular contexts of music composition. We present results from three perspectives: 1) at the population level, comparing descriptive statistics of the set of training transcriptions and generated transcriptions; 2…
High-quality datasets for learning-based modelling of polyphonic symbolic music remain less readily-accessible at scale than in other domains, such as language modelling or image classification. Deep learning algorithms show great potential for enabling the widespread use of interactive music generation technology in consumer applications, but the lack of large-scale datasets remains a bottleneck for the development of algorithms that can consistently generate high-quality outputs. We propose that models with narrow expertise can serve as a source of high-quality scalable synthetic data, and o…
Research Center for IT innovation, Academia Sinica（中央研究院资讯科技创新研究中心）
It has been shown recently that deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (GANs) can learn to generate music in the form of piano-rolls, which represent music by binary-valued time-pitch matrices. However, existing models can only generate real-valued piano-rolls and require further post-processing, such as hard thresholding (HT) or Bernoulli sampling (BS), to obtain the final binary-valued results. In this paper, we study whether we can have a convolutional GAN model that directly creates binary-valued piano-rolls by using binary neurons. Specifically, we propose to append to the gen…
Automatic music transcription is considered to be one of the hardest problems in music information retrieval, yet recent deep learning approaches have achieved substantial improvements on transcription performance. These approaches commonly employ supervised learning models that predict various time-frequency representations, by minimizing element-wise losses such as the cross entropy function. However, applying the loss in this manner assumes conditional independence of each label given the input, and thus cannot accurately express inter-label dependencies. To address this issue, we introduce…
ENSTA Bretagne（布列塔尼国立高等先进技术学校）；Université Européenne de Bretagne（布列塔尼欧洲大学）；Université Paris Descartes（巴黎笛卡尔大学）
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are a ubiquitous tool to model time series data, and have been widely used in two main tasks of Automatic Music Transcription (AMT): note segmentation, i.e. identifying the played notes after a multi-pitch estimation, and sequential post-processing, i.e. correcting note segmentation using training data. In this paper, we employ the multi-pitch estimation method called Probabilistic Latent Component Analysis (PLCA), and develop AMT systems by integrating different HMM-based modules in this framework. For note segmentation, we use two different twostate on/o? HMMs, in…
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）
Melody extraction is a vital music information retrieval task among music researchers for its potential applications in education pedagogy and the music industry. Melody extraction is a notoriously challenging task due to the presence of background instruments. Also, often melodic source exhibits similar characteristics to that of the other instruments. The interfering background accompaniment with the vocals makes extracting the melody from the mixture signal much more challenging. Until recently, classical signal processing-based melody extraction methods were quite popular among melody extr…
This paper explores a variety of models for frame-based music transcription, with an emphasis on the methods needed to reach state-of-the-art on human recordings. The translation-invariant network discussed in this paper, which combines a traditional filterbank with a convolutional neural network, was the top-performing model in the 2017 MIREX Multiple Fundamental Frequency Estimation evaluation. This class of models shares parameters in the log-frequency domain, which exploits the frequency invariance of music to reduce the number of model parameters and avoid overfitting to the training data…
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Smule Inc.（Smule公司）
Singing melody extraction is an important problem in the field of music information retrieval. Existing methods typically rely on frequency-domain representations to estimate the sung frequencies. However, this design does not lead to human-level performance in the perception of melody information for both tone (pitch-class) and octave. In this paper, we propose TONet, a plug-and-play model that improves both tone and octave perceptions by leveraging a novel input representation and a novel network architecture. First, we present an improved input representation, the Tone-CFP, that explicitly …
Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；OCA（蔚蓝海岸天文台）；IRIT（图卢兹计算机科学研究所）；Université de Bretagne Sud（南布列塔尼大学）；IRISA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所-雷恩第一大学联合研究中心）；Aix-Marseille Université（艾克斯-马赛大学）；LIF（计算机科学实验室）
Many spectral unmixing methods rely on the non-negative decomposition of spectral data onto a dictionary of spectral templates. In particular, state-of-the-art music transcription systems decompose the spectrogram of the input signal onto a dictionary of representative note spectra. The typical measures of fit used to quantify the adequacy of the decomposition compare the data and template entries frequency-wise. As such, small displacements of energy from a frequency bin to another as well as variations of timber can disproportionally harm the fit. We address these issues by means of optimal …
Sorbonne Universités（索邦大学）；UPMC University Paris 06（巴黎第六大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) consists in automatically estimating the notes in an audio recording, through three attributes: onset time, duration and pitch. Probabilistic Latent Component Analysis (PLCA) has become very popular for this task. PLCA is a spectrogram factorization method, able to model a magnitude spectrogram as a linear combination of spectral vectors from a dictionary. Such methods use the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate the parameters of the acoustic model. This algorithm presents well-known inherent defaults (local convergence, initialization depend…
Music is an art, perceived in unique ways by every listener, coming from acoustic signals. In the meantime, standards as musical scores exist to describe it. Even if humans can make this transcription, it is costly in terms of time and efforts, even more with the explosion of information consecutively to the rise of the Internet. In that sense, researches are driven in the direction of Automatic Music Transcription. While this task is considered solved in the case of single notes, it is still open when notes superpose themselves, forming chords. This report aims at developing some of the exist…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
Automatic Music Transcription (AMT), inferring musical notes from raw audio, is a challenging task at the core of music understanding. Unlike Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which typically focuses on the words of a single speaker, AMT often requires transcribing multiple instruments simultaneously, all while preserving fine-scale pitch and timing information. Further, many AMT datasets are "low-resource", as even expert musicians find music transcription difficult and time-consuming. Thus, prior work has focused on task-specific architectures, tailored to the individual instruments of eac…
This technical report gives a detailed, formal description of the features introduced in the paper: Adrien Ycart, Lele Liu, Emmanouil Benetos and Marcus T. Pearce. "Investigating the Perceptual Validity of Evaluation Metrics for Automatic Piano Music Transcription", Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR), Accepted, 2020.
Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje（斯科普里圣西里尔与美多德大学）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies（电气工程与信息技术学院）
Music transcription is the process of transcribing music audio into music notation. It is a field in which the machines still cannot beat human performance. The main motivation for automatic music transcription is to make it possible for anyone playing a musical instrument, to be able to generate the music notes for a piece of music quickly and accurately. It does not matter if the person is a beginner and simply struggles to find the music score by searching, or an expert who heard a live jazz improvisation and would like to reproduce it without losing time doing manual transcription. We prop…
Recent advancements in generative models have shown remarkable progress in music generation. However, most existing methods focus on generating monophonic or homophonic music, while the generation of polyphonic and multi-track music with rich attributes is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for multi-track, multi-attribute symphonic music generation using the diffusion model. Specifically, we generate piano-roll representations with a diffusion model and map them to MIDI format for output. To capture rich attribute information, we introduce a color coding sche…
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University（京都大学信息学研究生院）；The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University（京都大学白眉高级研究中心）；AIP Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, RIKEN（理化学研究所高级智能项目AIP中心）
Most work on musical score models (a.k.a. musical language models) for music transcription has focused on describing the local sequential dependence of notes in musical scores and failed to capture their global repetitive structure, which can be a useful guide for transcribing music. Focusing on rhythm, we formulate several classes of Bayesian Markov models of musical scores that describe repetitions indirectly using the sparse transition probabilities of notes or note patterns. This enables us to construct piece-specific models for unseen scores with an unfixed repetitive structure and to der…
Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
The goal of this study is the automatic detection of onsets of the singing voice in polyphonic audio recordings. Starting with a hypothesis that the knowledge of the current position in a metrical cycle (i.e. metrical accent) can improve the accuracy of vocal note onset detection, we propose a novel probabilistic model to jointly track beats and vocal note onsets. The proposed model extends a state of the art model for beat and meter tracking, in which a-priori probability of a note at a specific metrical accent interacts with the probability of observing a vocal note onset. We carry out an ev…
