AccoMontage2: A Complete Harmonization and Accompaniment Arrangement System

TL;DR

AccoMontage2 is a system that generates full-length, style-specific piano arrangements from a lead melody, introducing a new harmonization module and a user-friendly interface, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel harmonization module and a versatile GUI for style-specific arrangement, advancing automated music composition from lead melodies.

Findings

Harmonization module improves chord progression coherence.

System outperforms baseline methods in arrangement quality.

Public release of dataset and online application.

Abstract

We propose AccoMontage2, a system capable of doing full-length song harmonization and accompaniment arrangement based on a lead melody. Following AccoMontage, this study focuses on generating piano arrangements for popular/folk songs and it carries on the generalized template-based retrieval method. The novelties of this study are twofold. First, we invent a harmonization module (which AccoMontage does not have). This module generates structured and coherent full-length chord progression by optimizing and balancing three loss terms: a micro-level loss for note-wise dissonance, a meso-level loss for phrase-template matching, and a macro-level loss for full piece coherency. Second, we develop a graphical user interface which allows users to select different styles of chord progression and piano texture. Currently, chord progression styles include Pop, R&B, and Dark, while piano texture styles include several levels of voicing density and rhythmic complexity. Experimental results show that both our harmonization and arrangement results significantly outperform the baselines. Lastly, we release AccoMontage2 as an online application as well as the organized chord progression templates as a public dataset.