PA 3: Automatic Music Instrumentation
PAT 464/564: Generative AI for Music and Audio Creation (Winter 2026)
Instructions
- Please remember to submit your code. You will receive zero credit if the code is missing.
- All assignments must be completed on your own. You are welcome to exchange ideas with your peers, but this should be in the form of concepts and discussion, not in the form of writing and code.
- Provide proper citations/references for any external resources you use in your writing and code.
- Submit your work to Gradescope.
- Late submissions will be accepted for up to a week with 1 point deducted per day.
Automatic Music Instrumentation
In this assignment, you will train a transformer model for automatic instrumentation that can dynamically assign instruments to notes in solo music. We will be using the Lakh MIDI dataset (Raffel, 2016). The LMD dataset is a collection of 176,581 unique MIDI files, 45,129 of which have been matched and aligned to entries in the Million Song Dataset. Specifically, we will use a cleaner subset (Dong et al., 2018) consisting of 21,425 files. We will base our model on the Arranger framework (Dong et al., 2021). To simplify the task, we will group MIDI instruments into five tracks: piano, guitar, bass, strings, and brass.
Links to the Jupyter Notebook
References
- Colin Raffel, “Learning-Based Methods for Comparing Sequences, with Applications to Audio-to-MIDI Alignment and Matching,” PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2016.
- Hao-Wen Dong, Wen-Yi Hsiao, Li-Chia Yang, and Yi-Hsuan Yang, “MuseGAN: Multi-track Sequential Generative Adversarial Networks for Symbolic Music Generation and Accompaniment,” AAAI, 2018.
- Hao-Wen Dong, Chris Donahue, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, and Julian McAuley, “Towards Automatic Instrumentation by Learning to Separate Parts in Symbolic Multitrack Music,” ISMIR, 2021.