MIDI-Draw: Sketching to Control Melody Generation

TL;DR

MIDI-Draw introduces a user-friendly system enabling melody control through drawing contours, allowing expressive musical input without detailed note knowledge, contrasting with static parameter controls in existing methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel sketch-based interface for dynamic parameter control in melody generation, simplifying user interaction compared to traditional static controls.

Findings

Allows real-time contour-based parameter specification

Enables expressive melody control without prior musical knowledge

Demonstrates effective user interface for melody sketching

Abstract

We describe a proof-of-principle implementation of a system for drawing melodies that abstracts away from a note-level input representation via melodic contours. The aim is to allow users to express their musical intentions without requiring prior knowledge of how notes fit together melodiously. Current approaches to controllable melody generation often require users to choose parameters that are static across a whole sequence, via buttons or sliders. In contrast, our method allows users to quickly specify how parameters should change over time by drawing a contour.