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ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM (2402.16153v1)

Published 25 Feb 2024 in cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.MM, and eess.AS

Abstract: While LLMs demonstrate impressive capabilities in text generation, we find that their ability has yet to be generalized to music, humanity's creative language. We introduce ChatMusician, an open-source LLM that integrates intrinsic musical abilities. It is based on continual pre-training and finetuning LLaMA2 on a text-compatible music representation, ABC notation, and the music is treated as a second language. ChatMusician can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without any external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers. Interestingly, endowing musical abilities does not harm language abilities, even achieving a slightly higher MMLU score. Our model is capable of composing well-structured, full-length music, conditioned on texts, chords, melodies, motifs, musical forms, etc, surpassing GPT-4 baseline. On our meticulously curated college-level music understanding benchmark, MusicTheoryBench, ChatMusician surpasses LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5 on zero-shot setting by a noticeable margin. Our work reveals that LLMs can be an excellent compressor for music, but there remains significant territory to be conquered. We release our 4B token music-language corpora MusicPile, the collected MusicTheoryBench, code, model and demo in GitHub.

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Citations (25)
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Summary

  • The paper introduces ChatMusician, a novel LLM that treats music as a second language using ABC notation.
  • It refines training with a curated MusicPile corpus and uses MusicTheoryBench to overcome challenges in music generation.
  • Empirical results demonstrate superior performance in both compositional diversity and structured musical understanding compared to established baselines.

Integrating Musical Creativity and Understanding into LLMs with ChatMusician

Overview

ChatMusician introduces an innovative approach to incorporating intrinsic musical abilities into LLMs, enabling them to understand and generate music using ABC notation, a text-compatible music representation. By treating music as a "second language", this open-source LLM can generate coherent and structured musical pieces conditioned on various musical elements. Notably, ChatMusician demonstrates enhanced performance in both music generation tasks and music understanding benchmarks, without compromising its language capabilities.

Challenges in Music Generation and Understanding

Music, with its inherent structure and complexity, poses unique challenges for LLMs, particularly in capturing the long-term context dependency and the intricate connections between musical elements. The paper addresses these challenges by refining the LLM's training on a specially curated music-language corpus, MusicPile, and introducing the novel MusicTheoryBench for evaluating music understanding.

ABC Notation as a Solution

Choosing ABC notation for musical representation offers several advantages, such as a high compression rate and intrinsic encoding of musical repetition and structure, making it an efficient choice for LLM integration. This compatibility enables ChatMusician to effectively process and generate music within the confines of a LLM without requiring additional multi-modal structures.

Empirical Evaluations

Empirical evidence demonstrates ChatMusician's superior ability to compose music across various styles and structures, outperforming established baselines such as GPT-4. Additionally, the model excels in the MusicTheoryBench, showcasing its advanced understanding of music beyond the conventional capabilities of current LLMs. These results are further supported by human evaluation studies and specific metrics designed to assess musicality and controllability within the generated compositions.

Contributions to AI and Music

ChatMusician represents a significant advancement in the fusion of artificial intelligence and music, highlighting the potential for LLMs to serve as tools for creative expression and musicological analysis. The release of the MusicPile corpus, MusicTheoryBench, and the ChatMusician model itself provides a valuable resource for the research community, fostering further exploration into the capabilities of LLMs in understanding and generating music.

Practical and Theoretical Implications

From a practical standpoint, ChatMusician offers a scalable solution for music generation tasks, potentially contributing to various applications in music composition, education, and entertainment. Theoretically, this work enhances our understanding of the parallels between language and music processing in LLMs, supporting the idea that music can be treated as a form of language within these models.

Future Directions

While ChatMusician marks a substantial step forward, its current iteration exhibits a preference for generating Irish music and faces challenges in supporting open-ended music generation tasks. Future work will aim to diversify the model's capabilities and address issues related to hallucinations and the memorization effect, alongside developing strategies for mitigating copyright concerns associated with generated music.

Ethical Considerations

The ethical implications of employing ChatMusician, particularly concerning copyright infringement and the potential for misleading users, are acknowledged. The development of detection algorithms for music plagiarism and further alignment strategies are highlighted as future measures to address these concerns.

Conclusion

ChatMusician illustrates the promising conjunction of AI and music through the lens of LLMs, offering a novel framework for music understanding and generation. The integration of intrinsic musical capabilities within LLMs, as demonstrated by ChatMusician, paves the way for exploring the creative and analytical potentials of AI in the field of music.

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