Automatic Melody Composition Using Enhanced GAN

Abstract

In traditional music composition, the composer has a special knowledge of music and combines emotion and creative experience to create music. As computer technology has evolved, various music-related technologies have been developed. To create new music, a considerable amount of time is required. Therefore, a system is required that can automatically compose music from input music. This study proposes a novel melody composition method that enhanced the original generative adversarial network (GAN) model based on individual bars. Two discriminators were used to form the enhanced GAN model: one was a long short-term memory (LSTM) model that was used to ensure correlation between the bars, and the other was a convolutional neural network (CNN) model that was used to ensure rationality of the bar structure. Experiments were conducted using bar encoding and the enhanced GAN model to compose a new melody and evaluate the quality of the composition melody. In the evaluation method, the TFIDF algorithm was also used to calculate the structural differences between four types of musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) file (i.e., randomly composed melody, melody composed by the original GAN, melody composed by the proposed method, and the real melody). Using the TFIDF algorithm, the structures of the melody composed were compared by the proposed method with the real melody and the structure of the traditional melody was compared with the structure of the real melody. The experimental results showed that the melody composed by the proposed method had more similarity with real melody structure with a difference of only 8% than that of the traditional melody structure.