Chord-Conditioned Melody Harmonization with Controllable Harmonicity

TL;DR

This paper introduces DeepChoir, a system for melody harmonization conditioned on chord progressions, allowing user control over harmonicity, and demonstrates its effectiveness through experimental validation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel music representation for chord conditioning and a controllable harmonization system, addressing gaps in assistive chorale generation tools.

Findings

Effective chord conditioning music representation

DeepChoir achieves controllable harmonicity

Experimental results validate system effectiveness

Abstract

Melody harmonization has long been closely associated with chorales composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Previous works rarely emphasised chorale generation conditioned on chord progressions, and there has been a lack of focus on assistive compositional tools. In this paper, we first designed a music representation that encoded chord symbols for chord conditioning, and then proposed DeepChoir, a melody harmonization system that can generate a four-part chorale for a given melody conditioned on a chord progression. With controllable harmonicity, users can control the extent of harmonicity for generated chorales. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the music representation and the controllability of DeepChoir.