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MusicLM: Generating Music From Text

Andrea Agostinelli, Timo I. Denk, Zalán Borsos

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Jesse Engel, Mauro Verzetti, Antoine Caillon, Qingqing Huang, Aren Jansen, Adam Roberts, Marco Tagliasacchi, Matt Sharifi, Neil Zeghidour, Christian Frank

2023 · arXiv

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From the abstract

We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as "a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff". MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes. Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and adherence to the text description. Moreover, we demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption. To support future research, we publicly release MusicCaps, a dataset composed of 5.5k music-text pairs, with rich text descriptions provided by human experts.

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3 selected excerpts · 3 total mentions

JoeDaDude
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"Computer Music" is a very broad term (no surprises here) so, like many here, I can point out topics that are not covered. In particular, computer music (aka algorithmic) composition [1], or very recent AI techniques like the Google seq2seq example at [2], or the (unpublished, but probably a form of generative adversarial networks) techniques used by SunoAI and Udio. [1]. https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~blackrse/algorithm.html [2]. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.11325
m-i-l
Neutral mention · rule
>"Nice, but somehow it feels like I've heard these songs before. Could that be possible?" According to the paper[0] "We found that only a tiny fraction of examples was memorized exactly, while for 1% of the examples we could identify an approximate match." FWIW I'm pretty sure I heard a fragment of Kalinka (a folk tune in the public domain) in one of the samples I generated. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.11325.pdf
andreyk
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Link to paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11325 (the one on the site seems broken) Even with the knowledge that something like this is inevitabely coming, it's pretty crazy to see the examples. The fact it can create fitting music from painting descriptions (including ones such as or Guernica) is unexpected. And it seems to generate almost naturalistic vocals with reasonable-sounding lyrics, with no embedded structure for lyrics or anything. The paper itself is pretty cool. While GPT-3 was just "GPT-2, but bigger", this seems to have required some clever combination of models. Wonder if similar ideas will be needed for longer-form text or video generation.

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