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Neural Melody Composition from Lyrics

  • Hangbo Bao*
  • , Shaohan Huang
  • , Furu Wei
  • , Lei Cui
  • , Yu Wu
  • , Chuanqi Tan
  • , Songhao Piao
  • , Ming Zhou
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology
  • Microsoft USA
  • Beihang University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

In this paper, we study a novel task that learns to compose music from natural language. Given the lyrics as input, we propose a melody composition model that generates lyrics-conditional melody as well as the exact alignment between the generated melody and the given lyrics simultaneously. More specifically, we develop the melody composition model based on the sequence-to-sequence framework. It consists of two neural encoders to encode the current lyrics and the context melody respectively, and a hierarchical decoder to jointly produce musical notes and the corresponding alignment. Experimental results on lyrics-melody pairs of 18,451 pop songs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. In addition, we apply a singing voice synthesizer software to synthesize the “singing” of the lyrics and melodies for human evaluation. Results indicate that our generated melodies are more melodious and tuneful compared with the baseline method.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNatural Language Processing and Chinese Computing - 8th CCF International Conference, NLPCC 2019, Proceedings
EditorsJie Tang, Min-Yen Kan, Dongyan Zhao, Sujian Li, Hongying Zan
PublisherSpringer
Pages499-511
Number of pages13
ISBN (Print)9783030322328
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event8th CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2019 - Dunhuang, China
Duration: 9 Oct 201914 Oct 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11838 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference8th CCF International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2019
Country/TerritoryChina
CityDunhuang
Period9/10/1914/10/19

Keywords

  • Conditional sequence generation
  • Neural melody composition

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