Pianistic Neuralnetworks Output Aleatoric Improvisations

An implementation of Google Magenta's Music Transformer in Python/Pytorch. This library is designed to train a neural network on Piano MIDI data to generate musical samples. MIDIs are encoded into "Event Sequences", a dense array of musical instructions (note on, note off, dynamic change, time shift) encoded as numerical tokens. A custom transformer model learns to predict instructions on training sequences, and in generate.py a trained model can randomly sample from its learned distribution. (It is recommended to 'prime' the model's internal state with a MIDI input.)

The initial dataset comes from several years of recordings from the International Piano-e-Competition: over 1,000 performances played by professional pianists on a Yamaha Disklavier. Obtainable here. A sufficiently large dataset (order of 50 MB) of piano MIDIs should be sufficient to train a model.

Google Colab is a good free option for experimentation. But for running a model for multiple hours, I would recommend using a Google Cloud compute instance with GPU driver(s). This tutorial from fast.ai shows you how to get up and running on a GPU instance. (I would recommend using a non-preemptible instance for sanity's sake.) Once you're ssh'ed in...

• Clone the repo. Pull the training data with wget https://storage.googleapis.com/magentadata/datasets/maestro/v2.0.0/maestro-v2.0.0-midi.zip and unzip -q maestro-v2.0.0-midi.zip -d data/.
• Run source activate and pip install pretty-midi --user to install the preprocessing dependency to your conda environment.
• From a tmux screen, use python run.py and you're good to go! You can scp saved models back to your host machine.

• Effective encoding of MIDI data: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.03715
• Music Transformer AI Model: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04281
• Relative self-attention: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02155
• Original Transformer paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02155
• Guide to the above, with code: https://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/2018/04/03/attention.html
• Very readable introduction to attention/transformers: http://www.peterbloem.nl/blog/transformers