Multi-view MidiVAE: Fusing Track- and Bar-view Representations for Long Multi-track Symbolic Music Generation

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) constitute a crucial component of neural symbolic music generation, among which some works have yielded outstanding results and attracted considerable attention. Nevertheless, previous VAEs still encounter issues with overly long feature sequences and generated results lack contextual coherence, thus the challenge of modeling long multi-track symbolic music still remains unaddressed. To this end, we propose Multi-view MidiVAE, as one of the pioneers in VAE methods that effectively model and generate long multi-track symbolic music. The Multi-view MidiVAE utilizes the two-dimensional (2-D) representation, OctupleMIDI, to capture relationships among notes while reducing the feature sequences length. Moreover, we focus on instrumental characteristics and harmony as well as global and local information about the musical composition by employing a hybrid variational encoding-decoding strategy to integrate both Track- and Bar-view MidiVAE features. Objective and subjective experimental results on the CocoChorales dataset demonstrate that, compared to the baseline, Multi-view MidiVAE exhibits significant improvements in terms of modeling long multi-track symbolic music.

AnimeTAB: A new guitar tablature dataset of anime and game music

While guitar tablature has become a popular topic in MIR research, there exists no such a guitar tablature dataset that focuses on the soundtracks of anime and video games, which have a surprisingly broad and growing audience among the youths. In this paper, we present AnimeTAB, a fingerstyle guitar tablature dataset in MusicXML format, which provides more high-quality guitar tablature for both researchers and guitar players. AnimeTAB contains 412 full tracks and 547 clips, the latter are annotated with musical structures (intro, verse, chorus, and bridge). An accompanying analysis toolkit, TABprocessor, is included to further facilitate its use. This includes functions for melody and bassline extraction, key detection, and chord labeling, which are implemented using rule-based algorithms. We evaluated each of these functions against a manually annotated ground truth. Finally, as an example, we performed a music and technique analysis of AnimeTAB using TABprocessor. Our data and code have been made publicly available for composers, performers, and music information retrieval (MIR) researchers alike.