LyCon: Lyrics Reconstruction from the Bag-of-Words Using Large Language Models

This paper addresses the unique challenge of conducting research in lyric studies, where direct use of lyrics is often restricted due to copyright concerns. Unlike typical data, internet-sourced lyrics are frequently protected under copyright law, necessitating alternative approaches. Our study introduces a novel method for generating copyright-free lyrics from publicly available Bag-of-Words (BoW) datasets, which contain the vocabulary of lyrics but not the lyrics themselves. Utilizing metadata associated with BoW datasets and large language models, we successfully reconstructed lyrics. We have compiled and made available a dataset of reconstructed lyrics, LyCon, aligned with metadata from renowned sources including the Million Song Dataset, Deezer Mood Detection Dataset, and AllMusic Genre Dataset, available for public access. We believe that the integration of metadata such as mood annotations or genres enables a variety of academic experiments on lyrics, such as conditional lyric generation.

RP1M: A Large-Scale Motion Dataset for Piano Playing with Bi-Manual Dexterous Robot Hands

It has been a long-standing research goal to endow robot hands with human-level dexterity. Bi-manual robot piano playing constitutes a task that combines challenges from dynamic tasks, such as generating fast while precise motions, with slower but contact-rich manipulation problems. Although reinforcement learning based approaches have shown promising results in single-task performance, these methods struggle in a multi-song setting. Our work aims to close this gap and, thereby, enable imitation learning approaches for robot piano playing at scale. To this end, we introduce the Robot Piano 1 Million (RP1M) dataset, containing bi-manual robot piano playing motion data of more than one million trajectories. We formulate finger placements as an optimal transport problem, thus, enabling automatic annotation of vast amounts of unlabeled songs. Benchmarking existing imitation learning approaches shows that such approaches reach state-of-the-art robot piano playing performance by leveraging RP1M.

Music Era Recognition Using Supervised Contrastive Learning and Artist Information

Does popular music from the 60s sound different than that of the 90s? Prior study has shown that there would exist some variations of patterns and regularities related to instrumentation changes and growing loudness across multi-decadal trends. This indicates that perceiving the era of a song from musical features such as audio and artist information is possible. Music era information can be an important feature for playlist generation and recommendation. However, the release year of a song can be inaccessible in many circumstances. This paper addresses a novel task of music era recognition. We formulate the task as a music classification problem and propose solutions based on supervised contrastive learning. An audio-based model is developed to predict the era from audio. For the case where the artist information is available, we extend the audio-based model to take multimodal inputs and develop a framework, called MultiModal Contrastive (MMC) learning, to enhance the training. Experimental result on Million Song Dataset demonstrates that the audio-based model achieves 54% in accuracy with a tolerance of 3-years range; incorporating the artist information with the MMC framework for training leads to 9% improvement further.

Musical Word Embedding for Music Tagging and Retrieval

Word embedding has become an essential means for text-based information retrieval. Typically, word embeddings are learned from large quantities of general and unstructured text data. However, in the domain of music, the word embedding may have difficulty understanding musical contexts or recognizing music-related entities like artists and tracks. To address this issue, we propose a new approach called Musical Word Embedding (MWE), which involves learning from various types of texts, including both everyday and music-related vocabulary. We integrate MWE into an audio-word joint representation framework for tagging and retrieving music, using words like tag, artist, and track that have different levels of musical specificity. Our experiments show that using a more specific musical word like track results in better retrieval performance, while using a less specific term like tag leads to better tagging performance. To balance this compromise, we suggest multi-prototype training that uses words with different levels of musical specificity jointly. We evaluate both word embedding and audio-word joint embedding on four tasks (tag rank prediction, music tagging, query-by-tag, and query-by-track) across two datasets (Million Song Dataset and MTG-Jamendo). Our findings show that the suggested MWE is more efficient and robust than the conventional word embedding.

Related Rhythms: Recommendation System To Discover Music You May Like

Machine Learning models are being utilized extensively to drive recommender systems, which is a widely explored topic today. This is especially true of the music industry, where we are witnessing a surge in growth. Besides a large chunk of active users, these systems are fueled by massive amounts of data. These large-scale systems yield applications that aim to provide a better user experience and to keep customers actively engaged. In this paper, a distributed Machine Learning (ML) pipeline is delineated, which is capable of taking a subset of songs as input and producing a new subset of songs identified as being similar to the inputted subset. The publicly accessible Million Songs Dataset (MSD) enables researchers to develop and explore reasonably efficient systems for audio track analysis and recommendations, without having to access a commercialized music platform. The objective of the proposed application is to leverage an ML system trained to optimally recommend songs that a user might like.

Equipping Pretrained Unconditional Music Transformers with Instrument and Genre Controls

The ''pretraining-and-finetuning'' paradigm has become a norm for training domain-specific models in natural language processing and computer vision. In this work, we aim to examine this paradigm for symbolic music generation through leveraging the largest ever symbolic music dataset sourced from the MuseScore forum. We first pretrain a large unconditional transformer model using 1.5 million songs. We then propose a simple technique to equip this pretrained unconditional music transformer model with instrument and genre controls by finetuning the model with additional control tokens. Our proposed representation offers improved high-level controllability and expressiveness against two existing representations. The experimental results show that the proposed model can successfully generate music with user-specified instruments and genre. In a subjective listening test, the proposed model outperforms the pretrained baseline model in terms of coherence, harmony, arrangement and overall quality.

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.

Towards Contrastive Learning in Music Video Domain

Contrastive learning is a powerful way of learning multimodal representations across various domains such as image-caption retrieval and audio-visual representation learning. In this work, we investigate if these findings generalize to the domain of music videos. Specifically, we create a dual en-coder for the audio and video modalities and train it using a bidirectional contrastive loss. For the experiments, we use an industry dataset containing 550 000 music videos as well as the public Million Song Dataset, and evaluate the quality of learned representations on the downstream tasks of music tagging and genre classification. Our results indicate that pre-trained networks without contrastive fine-tuning outperform our contrastive learning approach when evaluated on both tasks. To gain a better understanding of the reasons contrastive learning was not successful for music videos, we perform a qualitative analysis of the learned representations, revealing why contrastive learning might have difficulties uniting embeddings from two modalities. Based on these findings, we outline possible directions for future work. To facilitate the reproducibility of our results, we share our code and the pre-trained model.

Bootstrapping Contrastive Learning Enhanced Music Cold-Start Matching

We study a particular matching task we call Music Cold-Start Matching. In short, given a cold-start song request, we expect to retrieve songs with similar audiences and then fastly push the cold-start song to the audiences of the retrieved songs to warm up it. However, there are hardly any studies done on this task. Therefore, in this paper, we will formalize the problem of Music Cold-Start Matching detailedly and give a scheme. During the offline training, we attempt to learn high-quality song representations based on song content features. But, we find supervision signals typically follow power-law distribution causing skewed representation learning. To address this issue, we propose a novel contrastive learning paradigm named Bootstrapping Contrastive Learning (BCL) to enhance the quality of learned representations by exerting contrastive regularization. During the online serving, to locate the target audiences more accurately, we propose Clustering-based Audience Targeting (CAT) that clusters audience representations to acquire a few cluster centroids and then locate the target audiences by measuring the relevance between the audience representations and the cluster centroids. Extensive experiments on the offline dataset and online system demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Currently, we have deployed it on NetEase Cloud Music, affecting millions of users. Code will be released in the future.

A Scalable Framework for Automatic Playlist Continuation on Music Streaming Services

Music streaming services often aim to recommend songs for users to extend the playlists they have created on these services. However, extending playlists while preserving their musical characteristics and matching user preferences remains a challenging task, commonly referred to as Automatic Playlist Continuation (APC). Besides, while these services often need to select the best songs to recommend in real-time and among large catalogs with millions of candidates, recent research on APC mainly focused on models with few scalability guarantees and evaluated on relatively small datasets. In this paper, we introduce a general framework to build scalable yet effective APC models for large-scale applications. Based on a represent-then-aggregate strategy, it ensures scalability by design while remaining flexible enough to incorporate a wide range of representation learning and sequence modeling techniques, e.g., based on Transformers. We demonstrate the relevance of this framework through in-depth experimental validation on Spotify's Million Playlist Dataset (MPD), the largest public dataset for APC. We also describe how, in 2022, we successfully leveraged this framework to improve APC in production on Deezer. We report results from a large-scale online A/B test on this service, emphasizing the practical impact of our approach in such a real-world application.