Generative artificial intelligence models can be a valuable aid to music composition and live performance, both to aid the professional musician and to help democratize the music creation process for hobbyists. Here we present a novel method that, given an English word or phrase, generates 2 compasses of a 4-piece drum pattern that embodies the "mood" of the given language cue, or that could be used for an audiovisual scene described by the language cue. We envision this tool as composition aid for electronic music and audiovisual soundtrack production, or an improvisation tool for live performance. In order to produce the training samples for this model, besides manual annotation of the "scene" or "mood" terms, we have designed a novel method to extract the consensus drum track of any song. This consists of a 2-bar, 4-piece drum pattern that represents the main percussive motif of a song, which could be imported into any music loop device or live looping software. These two key components (drum pattern generation from a generalizable input, and consensus percussion extraction) present a novel approach to computer-aided composition and provide a stepping stone for more comprehensive rhythm generation.

Creating a complex work of art like music necessitates profound creativity. With recent advancements in deep learning and powerful models such as transformers, there has been huge progress in automatic music generation. In an accompaniment generation context, creating a coherent drum pattern with apposite fills and improvisations at proper locations in a song is a challenging task even for an experienced drummer. Drum beats tend to follow a repetitive pattern through stanzas with fills or improvisation at section boundaries. In this work, we tackle the task of drum pattern generation conditioned on the accompanying music played by four melodic instruments: Piano, Guitar, Bass, and Strings. We use the transformer sequence to sequence model to generate a basic drum pattern conditioned on the melodic accompaniment to find that improvisation is largely absent, attributed possibly to its expectedly relatively low representation in the training data. We propose a novelty function to capture the extent of improvisation in a bar relative to its neighbors. We train a model to predict improvisation locations from the melodic accompaniment tracks. Finally, we use a novel BERT-inspired in-filling architecture, to learn the structure of both the drums and melody to in-fill elements of improvised music.