Rock Guitar Tablature Generation via Natural Language Processing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach to generate heavy rock guitar tablature using autoregressive NLP models, addressing the challenges of high-dimensional audio data and extending prior methods to a new musical medium.

Contribution

It is the first to model heavy rock guitar tablature with NLP techniques, providing a public demo and advancing generative modeling in this specific genre.

Findings

Successful generation of heavy rock guitar tablature

Extension of NLP-based music modeling to guitar tabs

Public availability of a demo for further research

Abstract

Deep learning has recently empowered and democratized generative modeling of images and text, with additional concurrent works exploring the possibility of generating more complex forms of data, such as audio. However, the high dimensionality, long-range dependencies, and lack of standardized datasets currently makes generative modeling of audio and music very challenging. We propose to model music as a series of discrete notes upon which we can use autoregressive natural language processing techniques for successful generative modeling. While previous works used similar pipelines on data such as sheet music and MIDI, we aim to extend such approaches to the under-studied medium of guitar tablature. Specifically, we develop the first work to our knowledge that models one specific genre as guitar tablature: heavy rock. Unlike other works in guitar tablature generation, we have a freely available public demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/josuelmet/Metal_Music_Interpolator