Hierarchical Generative Modeling of Melodic Vocal Contours in Hindustani Classical Music

Hindustani music is a performance-driven oral tradition that exhibits the rendition of rich melodic patterns. In this paper, we focus on generative modeling of singers' vocal melodies extracted from audio recordings, as the voice is musically prominent within the tradition. Prior generative work in Hindustani music models melodies as coarse discrete symbols which fails to capture the rich expressive melodic intricacies of singing. Thus, we propose to use a finely quantized pitch contour, as an intermediate representation for hierarchical audio modeling. We propose GaMaDHaNi, a modular two-level hierarchy, consisting of a generative model on pitch contours, and a pitch contour to audio synthesis model. We compare our approach to non-hierarchical audio models and hierarchical models that use a self-supervised intermediate representation, through a listening test and qualitative analysis. We also evaluate audio model's ability to faithfully represent the pitch contour input using Pearson correlation coefficient. By using pitch contours as an intermediate representation, we show that our model may be better equipped to listen and respond to musicians in a human-AI collaborative setting by highlighting two potential interaction use cases (1) primed generation, and (2) coarse pitch conditioning.

Improving Source Separation by Explicitly Modeling Dependencies Between Sources

We propose a new method for training a supervised source separation system that aims to learn the interdependent relationships between all combinations of sources in a mixture. Rather than independently estimating each source from a mix, we reframe the source separation problem as an Orderless Neural Autoregressive Density Estimator (NADE), and estimate each source from both the mix and a random subset of the other sources. We adapt a standard source separation architecture, Demucs, with additional inputs for each individual source, in addition to the input mixture. We randomly mask these input sources during training so that the network learns the conditional dependencies between the sources. By pairing this training method with a block Gibbs sampling procedure at inference time, we demonstrate that the network can iteratively improve its separation performance by conditioning a source estimate on its earlier source estimates. Experiments on two source separation datasets show that training a Demucs model with an Orderless NADE approach and using Gibbs sampling (up to 512 steps) at inference time strongly outperforms a Demucs baseline that uses a standard regression loss and direct (one step) estimation of sources.

MIDI-DDSP: Detailed Control of Musical Performance via Hierarchical Modeling

Musical expression requires control of both what notes are played, and how they are performed. Conventional audio synthesizers provide detailed expressive controls, but at the cost of realism. Black-box neural audio synthesis and concatenative samplers can produce realistic audio, but have few mechanisms for control. In this work, we introduce MIDI-DDSP a hierarchical model of musical instruments that enables both realistic neural audio synthesis and detailed user control. Starting from interpretable Differentiable Digital Signal Processing (DDSP) synthesis parameters, we infer musical notes and high-level properties of their expressive performance (such as timbre, vibrato, dynamics, and articulation). This creates a 3-level hierarchy (notes, performance, synthesis) that affords individuals the option to intervene at each level, or utilize trained priors (performance given notes, synthesis given performance) for creative assistance. Through quantitative experiments and listening tests, we demonstrate that this hierarchy can reconstruct high-fidelity audio, accurately predict performance attributes for a note sequence, independently manipulate the attributes of a given performance, and as a complete system, generate realistic audio from a novel note sequence. By utilizing an interpretable hierarchy, with multiple levels of granularity, MIDI-DDSP opens the door to assistive tools to empower individuals across a diverse range of musical experience.

AI Song Contest: Human-AI Co-Creation in Songwriting

Machine learning is challenging the way we make music. Although research in deep generative models has dramatically improved the capability and fluency of music models, recent work has shown that it can be challenging for humans to partner with this new class of algorithms. In this paper, we present findings on what 13 musician/developer teams, a total of 61 users, needed when co-creating a song with AI, the challenges they faced, and how they leveraged and repurposed existing characteristics of AI to overcome some of these challenges. Many teams adopted modular approaches, such as independently running multiple smaller models that align with the musical building blocks of a song, before re-combining their results. As ML models are not easily steerable, teams also generated massive numbers of samples and curated them post-hoc, or used a range of strategies to direct the generation, or algorithmically ranked the samples. Ultimately, teams not only had to manage the "flare and focus" aspects of the creative process, but also juggle them with a parallel process of exploring and curating multiple ML models and outputs. These findings reflect a need to design machine learning-powered music interfaces that are more decomposable, steerable, interpretable, and adaptive, which in return will enable artists to more effectively explore how AI can extend their personal expression.

The Bach Doodle: Approachable music composition with machine learning at scale

To make music composition more approachable, we designed the first AI-powered Google Doodle, the Bach Doodle, where users can create their own melody and have it harmonized by a machine learning model Coconet (Huang et al., 2017) in the style of Bach. For users to input melodies, we designed a simplified sheet-music based interface. To support an interactive experience at scale, we re-implemented Coconet in TensorFlow.js (Smilkov et al., 2019) to run in the browser and reduced its runtime from 40s to 2s by adopting dilated depth-wise separable convolutions and fusing operations. We also reduced the model download size to approximately 400KB through post-training weight quantization. We calibrated a speed test based on partial model evaluation time to determine if the harmonization request should be performed locally or sent to remote TPU servers. In three days, people spent 350 years worth of time playing with the Bach Doodle, and Coconet received more than 55 million queries. Users could choose to rate their compositions and contribute them to a public dataset, which we are releasing with this paper. We hope that the community finds this dataset useful for applications ranging from ethnomusicological studies, to music education, to improving machine learning models.

Counterpoint by Convolution

Machine learning models of music typically break up the task of composition into a chronological process, composing a piece of music in a single pass from beginning to end. On the contrary, human composers write music in a nonlinear fashion, scribbling motifs here and there, often revisiting choices previously made. In order to better approximate this process, we train a convolutional neural network to complete partial musical scores, and explore the use of blocked Gibbs sampling as an analogue to rewriting. Neither the model nor the generative procedure are tied to a particular causal direction of composition. Our model is an instance of orderless NADE (Uria et al., 2014), which allows more direct ancestral sampling. However, we find that Gibbs sampling greatly improves sample quality, which we demonstrate to be due to some conditional distributions being poorly modeled. Moreover, we show that even the cheap approximate blocked Gibbs procedure from Yao et al. (2014) yields better samples than ancestral sampling, based on both log-likelihood and human evaluation.

Enabling Factorized Piano Music Modeling and Generation with the MAESTRO Dataset

Generating musical audio directly with neural networks is notoriously difficult because it requires coherently modeling structure at many different timescales. Fortunately, most music is also highly structured and can be represented as discrete note events played on musical instruments. Herein, we show that by using notes as an intermediate representation, we can train a suite of models capable of transcribing, composing, and synthesizing audio waveforms with coherent musical structure on timescales spanning six orders of magnitude (~0.1 ms to ~100 s), a process we call Wave2Midi2Wave. This large advance in the state of the art is enabled by our release of the new MAESTRO (MIDI and Audio Edited for Synchronous TRacks and Organization) dataset, composed of over 172 hours of virtuosic piano performances captured with fine alignment (~3 ms) between note labels and audio waveforms. The networks and the dataset together present a promising approach toward creating new expressive and interpretable neural models of music.

Music Transformer

Music relies heavily on repetition to build structure and meaning. Self-reference occurs on multiple timescales, from motifs to phrases to reusing of entire sections of music, such as in pieces with ABA structure. The Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017), a sequence model based on self-attention, has achieved compelling results in many generation tasks that require maintaining long-range coherence. This suggests that self-attention might also be well-suited to modeling music. In musical composition and performance, however, relative timing is critically important. Existing approaches for representing relative positional information in the Transformer modulate attention based on pairwise distance (Shaw et al., 2018). This is impractical for long sequences such as musical compositions since their memory complexity is quadratic in the sequence length. We propose an algorithm that reduces the intermediate memory requirements to linear in the sequence length. This enables us to demonstrate that a Transformer with our modified relative attention mechanism can generate minute-long (thousands of steps) compositions with compelling structure, generate continuations that coherently elaborate on a given motif, and in a seq2seq setup generate accompaniments conditioned on melodies. We evaluate the Transformer with our relative attention mechanism on two datasets, JSB Chorales and Piano-e-competition, and obtain state-of-the-art results on the latter.