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Register a new userMusicBERT: Symbolic Music Understanding with Large-Scale Pre-Training
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Added by
Xu Tan
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Symbolic music understanding, which refers to the understanding of music from the symbolic data (e.g., MIDI format, but not audio), covers many music applications such as genre classification, emotion classification, and music pieces matching. While good music representations are beneficial for these applications, the lack of training data hinders representation learning. Inspired by the success of pre-training models in natural language processing, in this paper, we develop MusicBERT, a large-scale pre-trained model for music understanding. To this end, we construct a large-scale symbolic music corpus that contains more than 1 million music songs. Since symbolic music contains more structural (e.g., bar, position) and diverse information (e.g., tempo, instrument, and pitch), simply adopting the pre-training techniques from NLP to symbolic music only brings marginal gains. Therefore, we design several mechanisms, including OctupleMIDI encoding and bar-level masking strategy, to enhance pre-training with symbolic music data. Experiments demonstrate the advantages of MusicBERT on four music understanding tasks, including melody completion, accompaniment suggestion, genre classification, and style classification. Ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of our designs of OctupleMIDI encoding and bar-level masking strategy in MusicBERT.
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In natural language processing (NLP), the semantic similarity task requires large-scale, high-quality human-annotated labels for fine-tuning or evaluation. By contrast, in cases of music similarity, such labels are expensive to collect and largely dependent on the annotators artistic preferences. Recent research has demonstrated that embedding calibration technique can greatly increase semantic similarity performance of the pre-trained language model without fine-tuning. However, it is yet unknown which calibration method is the best and how much performance improvement can be achieved. To address these issues, we propose using composer information to construct labels for automatically evaluating music similarity. Under this paradigm, we discover the optimal combination of embedding calibration which achieves superior metrics than the baseline methods.
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