Exploring Tokenization Methods for Multitrack Sheet Music Generation

This study explores the tokenization of multitrack sheet music in ABC notation, introducing two methods--bar-stream and line-stream patching. We compare these methods against existing techniques, including bar patching, byte patching, and Byte Pair Encoding (BPE). In terms of both computational efficiency and the musicality of the generated compositions, experimental results show that bar-stream patching performs best overall compared to the others, which makes it a promising tokenization strategy for sheet music generation.

SymPAC: Scalable Symbolic Music Generation With Prompts And Constraints

Progress in the task of symbolic music generation may be lagging behind other tasks like audio and text generation, in part because of the scarcity of symbolic training data. In this paper, we leverage the greater scale of audio music data by applying pre-trained MIR models (for transcription, beat tracking, structure analysis, etc.) to extract symbolic events and encode them into token sequences. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate the feasibility of training symbolic generation models solely from auto-transcribed audio data. Furthermore, to enhance the controllability of the trained model, we introduce SymPAC (Symbolic Music Language Model with Prompting And Constrained Generation), which is distinguished by using (a) prompt bars in encoding and (b) a technique called Constrained Generation via Finite State Machines (FSMs) during inference time. We show the flexibility and controllability of this approach, which may be critical in making music AI useful to creators and users.

Foundation Models for Music: A Survey

In recent years, foundation models (FMs) such as large language models (LLMs) and latent diffusion models (LDMs) have profoundly impacted diverse sectors, including music. This comprehensive review examines state-of-the-art (SOTA) pre-trained models and foundation models in music, spanning from representation learning, generative learning and multimodal learning. We first contextualise the significance of music in various industries and trace the evolution of AI in music. By delineating the modalities targeted by foundation models, we discover many of the music representations are underexplored in FM development. Then, emphasis is placed on the lack of versatility of previous methods on diverse music applications, along with the potential of FMs in music understanding, generation and medical application. By comprehensively exploring the details of the model pre-training paradigm, architectural choices, tokenisation, finetuning methodologies and controllability, we emphasise the important topics that should have been well explored, like instruction tuning and in-context learning, scaling law and emergent ability, as well as long-sequence modelling etc. A dedicated section presents insights into music agents, accompanied by a thorough analysis of datasets and evaluations essential for pre-training and downstream tasks. Finally, by underscoring the vital importance of ethical considerations, we advocate that following research on FM for music should focus more on such issues as interpretability, transparency, human responsibility, and copyright issues. The paper offers insights into future challenges and trends on FMs for music, aiming to shape the trajectory of human-AI collaboration in the music realm.

Eagle and Finch: RWKV with Matrix-Valued States and Dynamic Recurrence

We present Eagle (RWKV-5) and Finch (RWKV-6), sequence models improving upon the RWKV (RWKV-4) architecture. Our architectural design advancements include multi-headed matrix-valued states and a dynamic recurrence mechanism that improve expressivity while maintaining the inference efficiency characteristics of RNNs. We introduce a new multilingual corpus with 1.12 trillion tokens and a fast tokenizer based on greedy matching for enhanced multilinguality. We trained four Eagle models, ranging from 0.46 to 7.5 billion parameters, and two Finch models with 1.6 and 3.1 billion parameters and find that they achieve competitive performance across a wide variety of benchmarks. We release all our models on HuggingFace under the Apache 2.0 license. Models at: https://huggingface.co/RWKV Training code at: https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-LM Inference code at: https://github.com/RWKV/ChatRWKV Time-parallel training code at: https://github.com/RWKV/RWKV-infctx-trainer

ByteComposer: a Human-like Melody Composition Method based on Language Model Agent

Large Language Models (LLM) have shown encouraging progress in multimodal understanding and generation tasks. However, how to design a human-aligned and interpretable melody composition system is still under-explored. To solve this problem, we propose ByteComposer, an agent framework emulating a human's creative pipeline in four separate steps : "Conception Analysis - Draft Composition - Self-Evaluation and Modification - Aesthetic Selection". This framework seamlessly blends the interactive and knowledge-understanding features of LLMs with existing symbolic music generation models, thereby achieving a melody composition agent comparable to human creators. We conduct extensive experiments on GPT4 and several open-source large language models, which substantiate our framework's effectiveness. Furthermore, professional music composers were engaged in multi-dimensional evaluations, the final results demonstrated that across various facets of music composition, ByteComposer agent attains the level of a novice melody composer.

Joint Music and Language Attention Models for Zero-shot Music Tagging

Music tagging is a task to predict the tags of music recordings. However, previous music tagging research primarily focuses on close-set music tagging tasks which can not be generalized to new tags. In this work, we propose a zero-shot music tagging system modeled by a joint music and language attention (JMLA) model to address the open-set music tagging problem. The JMLA model consists of an audio encoder modeled by a pretrained masked autoencoder and a decoder modeled by a Falcon7B. We introduce preceiver resampler to convert arbitrary length audio into fixed length embeddings. We introduce dense attention connections between encoder and decoder layers to improve the information flow between the encoder and decoder layers. We collect a large-scale music and description dataset from the internet. We propose to use ChatGPT to convert the raw descriptions into formalized and diverse descriptions to train the JMLA models. Our proposed JMLA system achieves a zero-shot audio tagging accuracy of $ 64.82\% $ on the GTZAN dataset, outperforming previous zero-shot systems and achieves comparable results to previous systems on the FMA and the MagnaTagATune datasets.

Universal Source Separation with Weakly Labelled Data

Universal source separation (USS) is a fundamental research task for computational auditory scene analysis, which aims to separate mono recordings into individual source tracks. There are three potential challenges awaiting the solution to the audio source separation task. First, previous audio source separation systems mainly focus on separating one or a limited number of specific sources. There is a lack of research on building a unified system that can separate arbitrary sources via a single model. Second, most previous systems require clean source data to train a separator, while clean source data are scarce. Third, there is a lack of USS system that can automatically detect and separate active sound classes in a hierarchical level. To use large-scale weakly labeled/unlabeled audio data for audio source separation, we propose a universal audio source separation framework containing: 1) an audio tagging model trained on weakly labeled data as a query net; and 2) a conditional source separation model that takes query net outputs as conditions to separate arbitrary sound sources. We investigate various query nets, source separation models, and training strategies and propose a hierarchical USS strategy to automatically detect and separate sound classes from the AudioSet ontology. By solely leveraging the weakly labelled AudioSet, our USS system is successful in separating a wide variety of sound classes, including sound event separation, music source separation, and speech enhancement. The USS system achieves an average signal-to-distortion ratio improvement (SDRi) of 5.57 dB over 527 sound classes of AudioSet; 10.57 dB on the DCASE 2018 Task 2 dataset; 8.12 dB on the MUSDB18 dataset; an SDRi of 7.28 dB on the Slakh2100 dataset; and an SSNR of 9.00 dB on the voicebank-demand dataset. We release the source code at https://github.com/bytedance/uss

ByteCover3: Accurate Cover Song Identification on Short Queries

Deep learning based methods have become a paradigm for cover song identification (CSI) in recent years, where the ByteCover systems have achieved state-of-the-art results on all the mainstream datasets of CSI. However, with the burgeon of short videos, many real-world applications require matching short music excerpts to full-length music tracks in the database, which is still under-explored and waiting for an industrial-level solution. In this paper, we upgrade the previous ByteCover systems to ByteCover3 that utilizes local features to further improve the identification performance of short music queries. ByteCover3 is designed with a local alignment loss (LAL) module and a two-stage feature retrieval pipeline, allowing the system to perform CSI in a more precise and efficient way. We evaluated ByteCover3 on multiple datasets with different benchmark settings, where ByteCover3 beat all the compared methods including its previous versions.

Graph Contrastive Learning with Implicit Augmentations

Existing graph contrastive learning methods rely on augmentation techniques based on random perturbations (e.g., randomly adding or dropping edges and nodes). Nevertheless, altering certain edges or nodes can unexpectedly change the graph characteristics, and choosing the optimal perturbing ratio for each dataset requires onerous manual tuning. In this paper, we introduce Implicit Graph Contrastive Learning (iGCL), which utilizes augmentations in the latent space learned from a Variational Graph Auto-Encoder by reconstructing graph topological structure. Importantly, instead of explicitly sampling augmentations from latent distributions, we further propose an upper bound for the expected contrastive loss to improve the efficiency of our learning algorithm. Thus, graph semantics can be preserved within the augmentations in an intelligent way without arbitrary manual design or prior human knowledge. Experimental results on both graph-level and node-level tasks show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other benchmarks, where ablation studies in the end demonstrate the effectiveness of modules in iGCL.

HTS-AT: A Hierarchical Token-Semantic Audio Transformer for Sound Classification and Detection

Audio classification is an important task of mapping audio samples into their corresponding labels. Recently, the transformer model with self-attention mechanisms has been adopted in this field. However, existing audio transformers require large GPU memories and long training time, meanwhile relying on pretrained vision models to achieve high performance, which limits the model's scalability in audio tasks. To combat these problems, we introduce HTS-AT: an audio transformer with a hierarchical structure to reduce the model size and training time. It is further combined with a token-semantic module to map final outputs into class featuremaps, thus enabling the model for the audio event detection (i.e. localization in time). We evaluate HTS-AT on three datasets of audio classification where it achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on AudioSet and ESC-50, and equals the SOTA on Speech Command V2. It also achieves better performance in event localization than the previous CNN-based models. Moreover, HTS-AT requires only 35% model parameters and 15% training time of the previous audio transformer. These results demonstrate the high performance and high efficiency of HTS-AT.