A Novel Bi-LSTM And Transformer Architecture For Generating Tabla Music

Introduction: Music generation is a complex task that has received significant attention in recent years, and deep learning techniques have shown promising results in this field. Objectives: While extensive work has been carried out on generating Piano and other Western music, there is limited research on generating classical Indian music due to the scarcity of Indian music in machine-encoded formats. In this technical paper, methods for generating classical Indian music, specifically tabla music, is proposed. Initially, this paper explores piano music generation using deep learning architectures. Then the fundamentals are extended to generating tabla music. Methods: Tabla music in waveform (.wav) files are pre-processed using the librosa library in Python. A novel Bi-LSTM with an Attention approach and a transformer model are trained on the extracted features and labels. Results: The models are then used to predict the next sequences of tabla music. A loss of 4.042 and MAE of 1.0814 are achieved with the Bi-LSTM model. With the transformer model, a loss of 55.9278 and MAE of 3.5173 are obtained for tabla music generation. Conclusion: The resulting music embodies a harmonious fusion of novelty and familiarity, pushing the limits of music composition to new horizons.