Recent advances in generative AI have made music generation a prominent research focus. However, many neural-based models rely on large datasets, raising concerns about copyright infringement and high-performance costs. In contrast, we propose MusicAIR, an innovative multimodal AI music generation framework powered by a novel algorithm-driven symbolic music core, effectively mitigating copyright infringement risks. The music core algorithms connect critical lyrical and rhythmic information to automatically derive musical features, creating a complete, coherent melodic score solely from the lyrics. The MusicAIR framework facilitates music generation from lyrics, text, and images. The generated score adheres to established principles of music theory, lyrical structure, and rhythmic conventions. We developed Generate AI Music (GenAIM), a web tool using MusicAIR for lyric-to-song, text-to-music, and image-to-music generation. In our experiments, we evaluated AI-generated music scores produced by the system using both standard music metrics and innovative analysis that compares these compositions with original works. The system achieves an average key confidence of 85%, outperforming human composers at 79%, and aligns closely with established music theory standards, demonstrating its ability to generate diverse, human-like compositions. As a co-pilot tool, GenAIM can serve as a reliable music composition assistant and a possible educational composition tutor while simultaneously lowering the entry barrier for all aspiring musicians, which is innovative and significantly contributes to AI for music generation.

Discrete representation learning has shown promising results across various domains, including generation and understanding in image, speech and language. Inspired by these advances, we propose MuseTok, a tokenization method for symbolic music, and investigate its effectiveness in both music generation and understanding tasks. MuseTok employs the residual vector quantized-variational autoencoder (RQ-VAE) on bar-wise music segments within a Transformer-based encoder-decoder framework, producing music codes that achieve high-fidelity music reconstruction and accurate understanding of music theory. For comprehensive evaluation, we apply MuseTok to music generation and semantic understanding tasks, including melody extraction, chord recognition, and emotion recognition. Models incorporating MuseTok outperform previous representation learning baselines in semantic understanding while maintaining comparable performance in content generation. Furthermore, qualitative analyses on MuseTok codes, using ground-truth categories and synthetic datasets, reveal that MuseTok effectively captures underlying musical concepts from large music collections.

Whereas chord transcription has received considerable attention during the past couple of decades, far less work has been devoted to transcribing and encoding the rhythmic patterns that occur in a song. The topic is especially relevant for instruments such as the rhythm guitar, which is typically played by strumming rhythmic patterns that repeat and vary over time. However, in many cases one cannot objectively define a single "right" rhythmic pattern for a given song section. To create a dataset with well-defined ground-truth labels, we asked expert musicians to transcribe the rhythmic patterns in 410 popular songs and record cover versions where the guitar tracks followed those transcriptions. To transcribe the strums and their corresponding rhythmic patterns, we propose a three-step framework. Firstly, we perform approximate stem separation to extract the guitar part from the polyphonic mixture. Secondly, we detect individual strums within the separated guitar audio, using a pre-trained foundation model (MERT) as a backbone. Finally, we carry out a pattern-decoding process in which the transcribed sequence of guitar strums is represented by patterns drawn from an expert-curated vocabulary. We show that it is possible to transcribe the rhythmic patterns of the guitar track in polyphonic music with quite high accuracy, producing a representation that is human-readable and includes automatically detected bar lines and time signature markers. We perform ablation studies and error analysis and propose a set of evaluation metrics to assess the accuracy and readability of the predicted rhythmic pattern sequence.

We propose a transformer-based rhythm quantization model that incorporates beat and downbeat information to quantize MIDI performances into metrically-aligned, human-readable scores. We propose a beat-based preprocessing method that transfers score and performance data into a unified token representation. We optimize our model architecture and data representation and train on piano and guitar performances. Our model exceeds state-of-the-art performance based on the MUSTER metric.

This paper introduces text2midi, an end-to-end model to generate MIDI files from textual descriptions. Leveraging the growing popularity of multimodal generative approaches, text2midi capitalizes on the extensive availability of textual data and the success of large language models (LLMs). Our end-to-end system harnesses the power of LLMs to generate symbolic music in the form of MIDI files. Specifically, we utilize a pretrained LLM encoder to process captions, which then condition an autoregressive transformer decoder to produce MIDI sequences that accurately reflect the provided descriptions. This intuitive and user-friendly method significantly streamlines the music creation process by allowing users to generate music pieces using text prompts. We conduct comprehensive empirical evaluations, incorporating both automated and human studies, that show our model generates MIDI files of high quality that are indeed controllable by text captions that may include music theory terms such as chords, keys, and tempo. We release the code and music samples on our demo page (https://github.com/AMAAI-Lab/Text2midi) for users to interact with text2midi.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) song generation has emerged as a popular topic, yet the focus on exploring the latent correlations between specific lyrical and rhythmic features remains limited. In contrast, this pilot study particularly investigates the relationships between keywords and rhythmically stressed features such as strong beats in songs. It focuses on several key elements: keywords or non-keywords, stressed or unstressed syllables, and strong or weak beats, with the aim of uncovering insightful correlations. Experimental results indicate that, on average, 80.8\% of keywords land on strong beats, whereas 62\% of non-keywords fall on weak beats. The relationship between stressed syllables and strong or weak beats is weak, revealing that keywords have the strongest relationships with strong beats. Additionally, the lyrics-rhythm matching score, a key matching metric measuring keywords on strong beats and non-keywords on weak beats across various time signatures, is 0.765, while the matching score for syllable types is 0.495. This study demonstrates that word types strongly align with their corresponding beat types, as evidenced by the distinct patterns, whereas syllable types exhibit a much weaker alignment. This disparity underscores the greater reliability of word types in capturing rhythmic structures in music, highlighting their crucial role in effective rhythmic matching and analysis. We also conclude that keywords that consistently align with strong beats are more reliable indicators of lyrics-rhythm associations, providing valuable insights for AI-driven song generation through enhanced structural analysis. Furthermore, our development of tailored Lyrics-Rhythm Matching (LRM) metrics maximizes lyrical alignments with corresponding beat stresses, and our novel LRM file format captures critical lyrical and rhythmic information without needing original sheet music.

Music foundation models possess impressive music generation capabilities. When people compose music, they may infuse their understanding of music into their work, by using notes and intervals to craft melodies, chords to build progressions, and tempo to create a rhythmic feel. To what extent is this true of music generation models? More specifically, are fundamental Western music theory concepts observable within the "inner workings" of these models? Recent work proposed leveraging latent audio representations from music generation models towards music information retrieval tasks (e.g. genre classification, emotion recognition), which suggests that high-level musical characteristics are encoded within these models. However, probing individual music theory concepts (e.g. tempo, pitch class, chord quality) remains under-explored. Thus, we introduce SynTheory, a synthetic MIDI and audio music theory dataset, consisting of tempos, time signatures, notes, intervals, scales, chords, and chord progressions concepts. We then propose a framework to probe for these music theory concepts in music foundation models (Jukebox and MusicGen) and assess how strongly they encode these concepts within their internal representations. Our findings suggest that music theory concepts are discernible within foundation models and that the degree to which they are detectable varies by model size and layer.

Generative models guided by text prompts are increasingly becoming more popular. However, no text-to-MIDI models currently exist, mostly due to the lack of a captioned MIDI dataset. This work aims to enable research that combines LLMs with symbolic music by presenting the first large-scale MIDI dataset with text captions that is openly available: MidiCaps. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files are a widely used format for encoding musical information. Their structured format captures the nuances of musical composition and has practical applications by music producers, composers, musicologists, as well as performers. Inspired by recent advancements in captioning techniques applied to various domains, we present a large-scale curated dataset of over 168k MIDI files accompanied by textual descriptions. Each MIDI caption succinctly describes the musical content, encompassing tempo, chord progression, time signature, instruments present, genre and mood; thereby facilitating multi-modal exploration and analysis. The dataset contains a mix of various genres, styles, and complexities, offering a rich source for training and evaluating models for tasks such as music information retrieval, music understanding and cross-modal translation. We provide detailed statistics about the dataset and have assessed the quality of the captions in an extensive listening study. We anticipate that this resource will stimulate further research in the intersection of music and natural language processing, fostering advancements in both fields.

Piano audio-to-score transcription (A2S) is an important yet underexplored task with extensive applications for music composition, practice, and analysis. However, existing end-to-end piano A2S systems faced difficulties in retrieving bar-level information such as key and time signatures, and have been trained and evaluated with only synthetic data. To address these limitations, we propose a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model with a hierarchical decoder that aligns with the hierarchical structure of musical scores, enabling the transcription of score information at both the bar and note levels by multi-task learning. To bridge the gap between synthetic data and recordings of human performance, we propose a two-stage training scheme, which involves pre-training the model using an expressive performance rendering (EPR) system on synthetic audio, followed by fine-tuning the model using recordings of human performance. To preserve the voicing structure for score reconstruction, we propose a pre-processing method for **Kern scores in scenarios with an unconstrained number of voices. Experimental results support the effectiveness of our proposed approaches, in terms of both transcription performance on synthetic audio data in comparison to the current state-of-the-art, and the first experiment on human recordings.

There has recently been a sharp increase in interest in Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC). Despite this, musical components such as time signatures have not been studied sufficiently to form an algorithmic determination approach for new compositions, especially lyrical songs. This is likely because of the neglect of musical details, which is critical for constructing a robust framework. Specifically, time signatures establish the fundamental rhythmic structure for almost all aspects of a song, including the phrases and notes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that only uses lyrics as input to automatically generate a fitting time signature for lyrical songs and uncover the latent rhythmic structure utilizing explainable machine learning models. In particular, we devise multiple methods that are associated with discovering lyrical patterns and creating new features that simultaneously contain lyrical, rhythmic, and statistical information. In this approach, the best of our experimental results reveal a 97.6% F1 score and a 0.996 Area Under the Curve (AUC) of the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) score. In conclusion, our research directly generates time signatures from lyrics automatically for new scores utilizing machine learning, which is an innovative idea that approaches an understudied component of musicology and therefore contributes significantly to the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) music generation.