From Generality to Mastery: Composer-Style Symbolic Music Generation via Large-Scale Pre-training

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yao, Mingyang, Chen, Ke
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Yao, Mingyang
Chen, Ke
author_facet Yao, Mingyang
Chen, Ke
contents Despite progress in controllable symbolic music generation, data scarcity remains a challenge for certain control modalities. Composer-style music generation is a prime example, as only a few pieces per composer are available, limiting the modeling of both styles and fundamental music elements (e.g., melody, chord, rhythm). In this paper, we investigate how general music knowledge learned from a broad corpus can enhance the mastery of specific composer styles, with a focus on piano piece generation. Our approach follows a two-stage training paradigm. First, we pre-train a REMI-based music generation model on a large corpus of pop, folk, and classical music. Then, we fine-tune it on a small, human-verified dataset from four renowned composers, namely Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, using a lightweight adapter module to condition the model on style indicators. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct both objective and subjective evaluations on style accuracy and musicality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms ablations and baselines, achieving more precise composer-style modeling and better musical aesthetics. Additionally, we provide observations on how the model builds music concepts from the generality pre-training and refines its stylistic understanding through the mastery fine-tuning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17497
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Generality to Mastery: Composer-Style Symbolic Music Generation via Large-Scale Pre-training
Yao, Mingyang
Chen, Ke
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
Despite progress in controllable symbolic music generation, data scarcity remains a challenge for certain control modalities. Composer-style music generation is a prime example, as only a few pieces per composer are available, limiting the modeling of both styles and fundamental music elements (e.g., melody, chord, rhythm). In this paper, we investigate how general music knowledge learned from a broad corpus can enhance the mastery of specific composer styles, with a focus on piano piece generation. Our approach follows a two-stage training paradigm. First, we pre-train a REMI-based music generation model on a large corpus of pop, folk, and classical music. Then, we fine-tune it on a small, human-verified dataset from four renowned composers, namely Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, using a lightweight adapter module to condition the model on style indicators. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct both objective and subjective evaluations on style accuracy and musicality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms ablations and baselines, achieving more precise composer-style modeling and better musical aesthetics. Additionally, we provide observations on how the model builds music concepts from the generality pre-training and refines its stylistic understanding through the mastery fine-tuning.
title From Generality to Mastery: Composer-Style Symbolic Music Generation via Large-Scale Pre-training
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17497