Six Dragons Fly Again: Reviving 15th-Century Korean Court Music with Transformers and Novel Encoding

TL;DR

This paper revives 15th-century Korean court music by applying transformer-based models and a novel encoding scheme to generate performable arrangements from ancient notation data.

Contribution

It introduces a new encoding scheme for Jeongganbo and demonstrates the successful application of transformer models to traditional music with limited data.

Findings

Generated music was evaluated positively by experts.

The approach successfully transforms ancient notation into performable arrangements.

Limited training data can be effectively used with careful model design.

Abstract

We introduce a project that revives a piece of 15th-century Korean court music, Chihwapyeong and Chwipunghyeong, composed upon the poem Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven. One of the earliest examples of Jeongganbo, a Korean musical notation system, the remaining version only consists of a rudimentary melody. Our research team, commissioned by the National Gugak (Korean Traditional Music) Center, aimed to transform this old melody into a performable arrangement for a six-part ensemble. Using Jeongganbo data acquired through bespoke optical music recognition, we trained a BERT-like masked language model and an encoder-decoder transformer model. We also propose an encoding scheme that strictly follows the structure of Jeongganbo and denotes note durations as positions. The resulting machine-transformed version of Chihwapyeong and Chwipunghyeong were evaluated by experts and performed by the Court Music Orchestra of National Gugak Center. Our work demonstrates that generative models can successfully be applied to traditional music with limited training data if combined with careful design.