The paper introduces the first general-purpose tokenisation framework for MusicXML and evaluates its impact on deep learning models for symbolic music. By training 26 autoregressive and masked language models, the authors compare MusicXML tokenisation against MIDI and ABC-based representations, exploring different tokenisation strategies and music-grammar-aware approaches. The study demonstrates that MusicXML-tokenised models outperform MIDI and text-based counterparts on both music understanding tasks (composer classification, difficulty estimation, accompaniment suggestion) and generative tasks, as shown by objective metrics and a human preference study.
arXiv:2607. 14537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rich internal representations of musical structure are essential for music understanding tasks such as machine-assisted music co-writing, yet self-supervised approaches for symbolic music representation remain underexplored, particularly those that encode the hierarchical multiscale nature of musical structures.
arXiv:2607. 27909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Objective evaluation of expressive MIDI piano performances typically relies on attribute statistics such as timing, velocity, and duration of individual notes.
Objective evaluation of expressive MIDI piano performances typically relies on attribute statistics such as timing, velocity, and duration of individual notes. However, these methods often disregard dependencies between notes, which poses a potential limitation in assessing the similarity between two sets of performances.
arXiv:2606. 13626v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study generative modeling of Bach-style symbolic piano music using a shared MIDI corpus and three model families: autoregressive LSTMs with attention, latent-variable models including recurrent VAEs and vector-quantized VAEs, and generative adversarial networks.
The paper proposes the Effectiveness–Losslessness Framework to guide tokenization in domains beyond language, using predictive codelength as a criterion. It introduces two boundaries: the Fact–Token Boundary, where observable structure should be encoded into tokens, and the Token–State Boundary, where context‑dependent relations should remain for model state rather than being pre‑tokenized. Experiments on symbolic music show that making musical time explicit and applying tonal‑frame canonicalization improve predictive performance, while fixed pitch coordinates and reversible BPE can increase predictive code length, indicating that carrier compaction alone does not guarantee better predictions.
DuoTok is a source‑aware dual‑track music tokenizer designed for vocal‑accompaniment generation. It first learns a semantic audio representation via self‑supervised pretraining, then refines source‑aware structure with feature‑replacement noise and multi‑task supervision (spectral reconstruction, source separation regularization, and an ASR head for lyric alignment). The encoder is frozen and hard‑routed codebooks for vocals and accompaniment are learned, while a diffusion decoder restores fine acoustic detail from the discrete tokens, achieving a favorable predictability‑fidelity trade‑off at ultra‑low bitrate across public benchmarks.
The paper explains why GPT‑style language models fail to transfer directly to symbolic music. It argues that success in language comes from tokenization that compresses data by creating a coordinate system where recurring patterns become predictable. For music, the authors propose that tokenization must build a predictively effective, relationally lossless coordinate system—defining Fact–Token and Token–State boundaries—to enable compression without sacrificing contextual freedom. Controlled experiments confirm that proper coordinate construction improves predictive compressibility, whereas mere sequence compaction does not.
We study generative modeling of Bach-style symbolic piano music using a shared MIDI corpus and three model families: autoregressive LSTMs with attention, latent-variable models including recurrent VAEs and vector-quantized VAEs, and generative adversarial networks. We compare their ability to model polyphonic note sequences, learn useful latent representations, and generate stylistically coherent compositions.
arXiv:2607. 20253v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this report, we present a unified song generation framework capable of producing high-quality full-length music from lyrics, text descriptions, and musical attributes.
In this report, we present a unified song generation framework capable of producing high-quality full-length music from lyrics, text descriptions, and musical attributes. The proposed framework supports three tasks: Lyrics-to-Song Generation, which generates complete songs from text descriptions, lyrics, and musical attributes; Instrumental Music Generation, which creates music without vocals; and Cover Song Generation, which reinterprets existing songs with different styles while preserving their melodic content.
MIDI-REPA is a framework that aligns symbolic music representations with intermediate layers of a flow-matching DiT model to improve text-to-music generation. By deriving MIDI supervision from automatic music transcription and aligning a MuScriptor-derived piano roll with an early DiT layer throughout the flow trajectory, the method achieves competitive performance on the ATTM objective metrics without extra training data or techniques. The approach is trainable on a single RTX 3090 in about 31 hours and is supported by released transcription pipeline, training code, and audio samples.
arXiv:2607. 13587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic symbolic music analysis has made substantial progress, yet existing systems are typically designed for a single mode of use, such as full-score prediction, and therefore do not match the broader range of operations that arise in analysis workflows, including partial completion, local correction, and iterative refinement.