Frechet Music Distance: A Metric For Generative Symbolic Music Evaluation

In this paper we introduce the Frechet Music Distance (FMD), a novel evaluation metric for generative symbolic music models, inspired by the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) in computer vision and Frechet Audio Distance (FAD) in generative audio. FMD calculates the distance between distributions of reference and generated symbolic music embeddings, capturing abstract musical features. We validate FMD across several datasets and models. Results indicate that FMD effectively differentiates model quality, providing a domain-specific metric for evaluating symbolic music generation, and establishing a reproducible standard for future research in symbolic music modeling.

Symbotunes: unified hub for symbolic music generative models

Implementations of popular symbolic music generative models often differ significantly in terms of the libraries utilized and overall project structure. Therefore, directly comparing the methods or becoming acquainted with them may present challenges. To mitigate this issue we introduce Symbotunes, an open-source unified hub for symbolic music generative models. Symbotunes contains modern Python implementations of well-known methods for symbolic music generation, as well as a unified pipeline for generating and training.

MidiTok Visualizer: a tool for visualization and analysis of tokenized MIDI symbolic music

Symbolic music research plays a crucial role in music-related machine learning, but MIDI data can be complex for those without musical expertise. To address this issue, we present MidiTok Visualizer, a web application designed to facilitate the exploration and visualization of various MIDI tokenization methods from the MidiTok Python package. MidiTok Visualizer offers numerous customizable parameters, enabling users to upload MIDI files to visualize tokenized data alongside an interactive piano roll.

CloserMusicDB: A Modern Multipurpose Dataset of High Quality Music

In this paper, we introduce CloserMusicDB, a collection of full length studio quality tracks annotated by a team of human experts. We describe the selected qualities of our dataset, along with three example tasks possible to perform using this dataset: hook detection, contextual tagging and artist identification. We conduct baseline experiments and provide initial benchmarks for these tasks.

Prevailing Research Areas for Music AI in the Era of Foundation Models

In tandem with the recent advancements in foundation model research, there has been a surge of generative music AI applications within the past few years. As the idea of AI-generated or AI-augmented music becomes more mainstream, many researchers in the music AI community may be wondering what avenues of research are left. With regards to music generative models, we outline the current areas of research with significant room for exploration. Firstly, we pose the question of foundational representation of these generative models and investigate approaches towards explainability. Next, we discuss the current state of music datasets and their limitations. We then overview different generative models, forms of evaluating these models, and their computational constraints/limitations. Subsequently, we highlight applications of these generative models towards extensions to multiple modalities and integration with artists' workflow as well as music education systems. Finally, we survey the potential copyright implications of generative music and discuss strategies for protecting the rights of musicians. While it is not meant to be exhaustive, our survey calls to attention a variety of research directions enabled by music foundation models.

The Biased Journey of MSD_AUDIO.ZIP

The equitable distribution of academic data is crucial for ensuring equal research opportunities, and ultimately further progress. Yet, due to the complexity of using the API for audio data that corresponds to the Million Song Dataset along with its misreporting (before 2016) and the discontinuation of this API (after 2016), access to this data has become restricted to those within certain affiliations that are connected peer-to-peer. In this paper, we delve into this issue, drawing insights from the experiences of 22 individuals who either attempted to access the data or played a role in its creation. With this, we hope to initiate more critical dialogue and more thoughtful consideration with regard to access privilege in the MIR community.