用均等时间步长重构乐谱,提升生成音乐的节奏一致性和效率
BEAT: Tokenizing and Generating Symbolic Music by Uniform Temporal Steps

- 以每个拍子为单位编码音乐事件,实现时间上的统一划分
- 在续写和伴奏生成中,音乐质量与结构连贯性显著提升
- 适合需要精准节奏控制的音乐生成任务,如自动作曲
将乐谱转化为适配语言模型通用框架的挑战在于其多样的符号化表示形式(如序列、网格、图)。现有方法通常将乐谱按音乐事件序列进行分词,如音符起始、音高、时移或复合音符事件。这种策略直观且在基于Transformer的模型中表现良好,但隐含地处理了音乐时间的规律性:单个标记可能跨越不同持续时间,导致时间推进不均匀。本文提出一种新思路:以固定时长的时间步(如一拍)作为基本单元进行分词。具体而言,将同一时间步内相同音高的所有事件合并为一个标记,并显式按时间步分组,类似于稀疏表示的钢琴卷帘。我们在音乐续写和伴奏生成任务上评估该分词方法,对比主流事件基方法。结果表明,该方法提升了音乐质量与结构连贯性;额外分析证实其具有更高的效率,并更有效地捕捉长程模式。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Tokenizing music to fit the general framework of language models is a compelling challenge, especially considering the diverse symbolic structures in which music can be represented (e.g., sequences, grids, and graphs). To date, most approaches tokenize symbolic music as sequences of musical events, such as onsets, pitches, time shifts, or compound note events. This strategy is intuitive and has proven effective in Transformer-based models, but it treats the regularity of musical time implicitly: individual tokens may span different durations, resulting in non-uniform time progression. In this paper, we instead consider whether an alternative tokenization is possible, where a uniform-length musical step (e.g., a beat) serves as the basic unit. Specifically, we encode all events within a single time step at the same pitch as one token, and group tokens explicitly by time step, which resembles a sparse encoding of a piano-roll representation. We evaluate the proposed tokenization on music continuation and accompaniment generation tasks, comparing it with mainstream event-based methods. Results show improved musical quality and structural coherence, while additional analyses confirm higher efficiency and more effective capture of long-range patterns with the proposed tokenization.
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