Incorporating Structure and Chord Constraints in Symbolic Transformer-based Melodic Harmonization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, Maximos, Soiledis, Konstantinos, Tsamis, Theodoros, Makris, Dimos, Katsouros, Vassilis, Cambouropoulos, Emilios
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, Maximos
Soiledis, Konstantinos
Tsamis, Theodoros
Makris, Dimos
Katsouros, Vassilis
Cambouropoulos, Emilios
author_facet Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, Maximos
Soiledis, Konstantinos
Tsamis, Theodoros
Makris, Dimos
Katsouros, Vassilis
Cambouropoulos, Emilios
contents Transformer architectures offer significant advantages regarding the generation of symbolic music; their capabilities for incorporating user preferences toward what they generate is being studied under many aspects. This paper studies the inclusion of predefined chord constraints in melodic harmonization, i.e., where a desired chord at a specific location is provided along with the melody as inputs and the autoregressive transformer model needs to incorporate the chord in the harmonization that it generates. The peculiarities of involving such constraints is discussed and an algorithm is proposed for tackling this task. This algorithm is called B* and it combines aspects of beam search and A* along with backtracking to force pretrained transformers to satisfy the chord constraints, at the correct onset position within the correct bar. The algorithm is brute-force and has exponential complexity in the worst case; however, this paper is a first attempt to highlight the difficulties of the problem and proposes an algorithm that offers many possibilities for improvements since it accommodates the involvement of heuristics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07627
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Incorporating Structure and Chord Constraints in Symbolic Transformer-based Melodic Harmonization
Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, Maximos
Soiledis, Konstantinos
Tsamis, Theodoros
Makris, Dimos
Katsouros, Vassilis
Cambouropoulos, Emilios
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Symbolic Computation
Transformer architectures offer significant advantages regarding the generation of symbolic music; their capabilities for incorporating user preferences toward what they generate is being studied under many aspects. This paper studies the inclusion of predefined chord constraints in melodic harmonization, i.e., where a desired chord at a specific location is provided along with the melody as inputs and the autoregressive transformer model needs to incorporate the chord in the harmonization that it generates. The peculiarities of involving such constraints is discussed and an algorithm is proposed for tackling this task. This algorithm is called B* and it combines aspects of beam search and A* along with backtracking to force pretrained transformers to satisfy the chord constraints, at the correct onset position within the correct bar. The algorithm is brute-force and has exponential complexity in the worst case; however, this paper is a first attempt to highlight the difficulties of the problem and proposes an algorithm that offers many possibilities for improvements since it accommodates the involvement of heuristics.
title Incorporating Structure and Chord Constraints in Symbolic Transformer-based Melodic Harmonization
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Symbolic Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07627