Classical Music Prediction and Composition by Means of Variational Autoencoders

Abstract

This paper proposes a new model for music prediction based on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). In this work, VAEs are used in a novel way to address two different issues: music representation into the latent space, and using this representation to make predictions of the future note events of the musical piece. This approach was trained with different songs of Handel. As a result, the system can represent the music in the latent space, and make accurate predictions. Therefore, the system can be used to compose new music either from an existing piece or from a random starting point. An additional feature of this system is that a small dataset was used for training. However, results show that the system is able to return accurate representations and predictions on unseen data.

Keywords

• music composition
• deep learning
• variational autoencoders