MahlerNet : Unbounded Orchestral Music with Neural Networks

Abstract: Modelling music with mathematical and statistical methods in general, and with neural networks in particular, has a long history and has been well explored in the last decades. Exactly when the first attempt at strictly systematic music took place is hard to say; some would say in the days of Mozart, others would say even earlier, but it is safe to say that the field of algorithmic composition has a long history. Even though composers have always had structure and rules as part of the writing process, implicitly or explicitly, following rules at a stricter level was well investigated in the middle of the 20th century at which point also the first music writing computer program based on mathematics was implemented. This work in computer science focuses on the history of musical composition with computers, also known as algorithmic composition, using machine learning and neural networks and consists of two parts: a literature survey covering in-depth the last decades in the field from which is drawn inspiration and experience to construct MahlerNet, a neural network based on the previous architectures MusicVAE, BALSTM, PerformanceRNN and BachProp, capable of modelling polyphonic symbolic music with up to 23 instruments. MahlerNet is a new architecture that uses a custom preprocessor with musical heuristics to normalize and filter the input and output files in MIDI format into a data representation that it uses for processing. MahlerNet, and its preprocessor, was written altogether for this project and produces music that clearly shows musical characteristics reminiscent of the data it was trained on, with some long-term structure, albeit not in the form of motives and themes.