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.
By Yi Wang
arXiv:2604. 19532v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tokenizing music to fit the general framework of language models is a compelling challenge, especially considering the diverse symbolic structures in which music can be represented (e.
By Lekai Qian, Haoyu Gu, Jingwei Zhao, Ziyu Wang
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.
By Rui Lin, Zhiyue Wu, Jiahe Lei, Kangdi Wang, Weixiong Chen, Junyu Dai, Tao Jiang
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.
By Andrea Poltronieri, Matteo Spanio, Simone Chieppa, Xavier Serra, Mart\'in Rocamora
arXiv:2606. 30642v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Full-length song generation must preserve coherence and musicality, render detailed vocal and accompaniment acoustics, and follow lyrics and prompts.
By Shun Lei, Huaicheng Zhang, Dapeng Wu, Yaoxun Xu, Lishi Zuo, Wei Tan, Hangting Chen, Guangzheng Li, Jianwei Yu, Zhiyong Wu, Dong Yu
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.
By Emmanouil Karystinaios, Johannes Hentschel, Markus Neuwirth, Gerhard Widmer