Exploring Classical Piano Performance Generation with Expressive Music Variational AutoEncoder

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Luo, Jing, Yang, Xinyu, Wei, Jie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Luo, Jing
Yang, Xinyu
Wei, Jie
author_facet Luo, Jing
Yang, Xinyu
Wei, Jie
contents The creativity of classical music arises not only from composers who craft the musical sheets but also from performers who interpret the static notations with expressive nuances. This paper addresses the challenge of generating classical piano performances from scratch, aiming to emulate the dual roles of composer and pianist in the creative process. We introduce the Expressive Compound Word (ECP) representation, which effectively captures both the metrical structure and expressive nuances of classical performances. Building on this, we propose the Expressive Music Variational AutoEncoder (XMVAE), a model featuring two branches: a Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) branch that generates score-related content, representing the Composer, and a vanilla VAE branch that produces expressive details, fulfilling the role of Pianist. These branches are jointly trained with similar Seq2Seq architectures, leveraging a multiscale encoder to capture beat-level contextual information and an orthogonal Transformer decoder for efficient compound tokens decoding. Both objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that XMVAE generates classical performances with superior musical quality compared to state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, pretraining the Composer branch on extra musical score datasets contribute to a significant performance gain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_01582
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Classical Piano Performance Generation with Expressive Music Variational AutoEncoder
Luo, Jing
Yang, Xinyu
Wei, Jie
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia
Audio and Speech Processing
The creativity of classical music arises not only from composers who craft the musical sheets but also from performers who interpret the static notations with expressive nuances. This paper addresses the challenge of generating classical piano performances from scratch, aiming to emulate the dual roles of composer and pianist in the creative process. We introduce the Expressive Compound Word (ECP) representation, which effectively captures both the metrical structure and expressive nuances of classical performances. Building on this, we propose the Expressive Music Variational AutoEncoder (XMVAE), a model featuring two branches: a Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) branch that generates score-related content, representing the Composer, and a vanilla VAE branch that produces expressive details, fulfilling the role of Pianist. These branches are jointly trained with similar Seq2Seq architectures, leveraging a multiscale encoder to capture beat-level contextual information and an orthogonal Transformer decoder for efficient compound tokens decoding. Both objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that XMVAE generates classical performances with superior musical quality compared to state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, pretraining the Composer branch on extra musical score datasets contribute to a significant performance gain.
title Exploring Classical Piano Performance Generation with Expressive Music Variational AutoEncoder
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01582