MuPT: A Generative Symbolic Music Pretrained Transformer

Xingwei Qu, Yuelin Bai, Yinghao Ma, Ziya Zhou, Ka Man Lo, Jiaheng Liu, Ruibin Yuan, Lejun Min, Xueling Liu, Tianyu Zhang, Xeron Du, Shuyue Guo, Yiming Liang, Yizhi Li, Shangda Wu, Junting Zhou, Tianyu Zheng, Ziyang Ma, Fengze Han, Wei Xue, Gus Xia, Emmanouil Benetos, Xiang Yue, Chenghua Lin, Xu Tan, Wenhao Huang, Jie Fu, Ge Zhang
May, 2025
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Abstract

In this paper, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the pre-training of music. While the prevalent use of MIDI in music modeling is well-established, our findings suggest that LLMs are inherently more compatible with ABC Notation, which aligns more closely with their design and strengths, thereby enhancing the model’s performance in musical composition. To address the challenges associated with misaligned measures from different tracks during generation, we propose the development of a Synchronized Multi-Track ABC Notation (SMT-ABC Notation), which aims to preserve coherence across multiple musical tracks. Our contributions include a series of models capable of handling up to 8192 tokens, covering 90% of the symbolic music data in our training set. Furthermore, we explore the implications of the Symbolic Music Scaling Law (SMS Law) on model performance. The results indicate a promising research direction in music generation, offering extensive resources for further research through our open-source contributions.

Type
Conference paper
Publication
In International Conference on Representation Learning 2025
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Paper

Deep Learning Music Generation LLM Generative AI
Tianyu Zhang
Tianyu Zhang
Ph.D. Student in Machine Learning

My research interests include Algorithmic Game Theory, Agent-based Model Simulator, AI for Climate Change, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Self-supervised Learning, Domain Adaptation. I am still exploring and learning slowly.