Composers' Evaluations of an AI Music Tool: Insights for Human-Centred Design

We present a study that explores the role of user-centred design in developing Generative AI (GenAI) tools for music composition. Through semi-structured interviews with professional composers, we gathered insights on a novel generative model for creating variations, highlighting concerns around trust, transparency, and ethical design. The findings helped form a feedback loop, guiding improvements to the model that emphasised traceability, transparency and explainability. They also revealed new areas for innovation, including novel features for controllability and research questions on the ethical and practical implementation of GenAI models.

Exploring Transformer-Based Music Overpainting for Jazz Piano Variations

This paper explores transformer-based models for music overpainting, focusing on jazz piano variations. Music overpainting generates new variations while preserving the melodic and harmonic structure of the input. Existing approaches are limited by small datasets, restricting scalability and diversity. We introduce VAR4000, a subset of a larger dataset for jazz piano performances, consisting of 4,352 training pairs. Using a semi-automatic pipeline, we evaluate two transformer configurations on VAR4000, comparing their performance with the smaller JAZZVAR dataset. Preliminary results show promising improvements in generalisation and performance with the larger dataset configuration, highlighting the potential of transformer models to scale effectively for music overpainting on larger and more diverse datasets.

JAZZVAR: A Dataset of Variations found within Solo Piano Performances of Jazz Standards for Music Overpainting

Jazz pianists often uniquely interpret jazz standards. Passages from these interpretations can be viewed as sections of variation. We manually extracted such variations from solo jazz piano performances. The JAZZVAR dataset is a collection of 502 pairs of Variation and Original MIDI segments. Each Variation in the dataset is accompanied by a corresponding Original segment containing the melody and chords from the original jazz standard. Our approach differs from many existing jazz datasets in the music information retrieval (MIR) community, which often focus on improvisation sections within jazz performances. In this paper, we outline the curation process for obtaining and sorting the repertoire, the pipeline for creating the Original and Variation pairs, and our analysis of the dataset. We also introduce a new generative music task, Music Overpainting, and present a baseline Transformer model trained on the JAZZVAR dataset for this task. Other potential applications of our dataset include expressive performance analysis and performer identification.