Hookpad Aria: A Copilot for Songwriters

TL;DR

Hookpad Aria is an AI-powered tool integrated into a web-based music editor that assists songwriters by generating musical continuations, filling in missing parts, and creating harmony, thereby streamlining the songwriting process.

Contribution

It introduces a novel generative AI system specifically designed for non-sequential music composition workflows within a popular songwriting platform.

Findings

Generated 318,000 suggestions for 3,000 users

74,000 suggestions accepted into songs

Supports multiple music generation tasks

Abstract

We present Hookpad Aria, a generative AI system designed to assist musicians in writing Western pop songs. Our system is seamlessly integrated into Hookpad, a web-based editor designed for the composition of lead sheets: symbolic music scores that describe melody and harmony. Hookpad Aria has numerous generation capabilities designed to assist users in non-sequential composition workflows, including: (1) generating left-to-right continuations of existing material, (2) filling in missing spans in the middle of existing material, and (3) generating harmony from melody and vice versa. Hookpad Aria is also a scalable data flywheel for music co-creation -- since its release in March 2024, Aria has generated 318k suggestions for 3k users who have accepted 74k into their songs. More information about Hookpad Aria is available at https://www.hooktheory.com/hookpad/aria