arXiv Machine Learning By Andrea Poltronieri, Matteo Spanio, Simone Chieppa, Xavier Serra, Mart\'in Rocamora

Does Notation Matter? MusicXML Tokenisation for Symbolic Music Generation and Understanding

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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.

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