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Main Authors: Wang, Changhong, Olvera, Michel, Richard, Gaël
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00123
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author Wang, Changhong
Olvera, Michel
Richard, Gaël
author_facet Wang, Changhong
Olvera, Michel
Richard, Gaël
contents The connection between music and lyrics is far beyond semantic bonds. Conceptual pairs in the two modalities such as rhythm and rhyme, note duration and syllabic stress, and structure correspondence, raise a compelling yet seldom-explored direction in the field of music information retrieval. In this paper, we present melody-lyrics matching (MLM), a new task which retrieves potential lyrics for a given symbolic melody from text sources. Rather than generating lyrics from scratch, MLM essentially exploits the relationships between melody and lyrics. We propose a self-supervised representation learning framework with contrastive alignment loss for melody and lyrics. This has the potential to leverage the abundance of existing songs with paired melody and lyrics. No alignment annotations are required. Additionally, we introduce sylphone, a novel representation for lyrics at syllable-level activated by phoneme identity and vowel stress. We demonstrate that our method can match melody with coherent and singable lyrics with empirical results and intuitive examples. We open source code and provide matching examples on the companion webpage: https://github.com/changhongw/mlm.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_00123
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Melody-Lyrics Matching with Contrastive Alignment Loss
Wang, Changhong
Olvera, Michel
Richard, Gaël
Audio and Speech Processing
Information Retrieval
The connection between music and lyrics is far beyond semantic bonds. Conceptual pairs in the two modalities such as rhythm and rhyme, note duration and syllabic stress, and structure correspondence, raise a compelling yet seldom-explored direction in the field of music information retrieval. In this paper, we present melody-lyrics matching (MLM), a new task which retrieves potential lyrics for a given symbolic melody from text sources. Rather than generating lyrics from scratch, MLM essentially exploits the relationships between melody and lyrics. We propose a self-supervised representation learning framework with contrastive alignment loss for melody and lyrics. This has the potential to leverage the abundance of existing songs with paired melody and lyrics. No alignment annotations are required. Additionally, we introduce sylphone, a novel representation for lyrics at syllable-level activated by phoneme identity and vowel stress. We demonstrate that our method can match melody with coherent and singable lyrics with empirical results and intuitive examples. We open source code and provide matching examples on the companion webpage: https://github.com/changhongw/mlm.
title Melody-Lyrics Matching with Contrastive Alignment Loss
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00123