The Florence Price Art Song Dataset and Piano Accompaniment Generator

TL;DR

This paper introduces a digital catalog of Florence Price's art songs and piano arrangements, and develops a model to generate accompaniments in her style, validated by a listening experiment.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive digital dataset of Florence Price's works and presents a novel style-specific piano accompaniment generator trained on this dataset.

Findings

Generated accompaniments are often perceived as stylistically similar to Price's music.

The model outperforms baseline in style recognition during blind listening tests.

The dataset and model are publicly released for further research.

Abstract

Florence B. Price was a composer in the early 20th century whose music reflects her upbringing in the American South, her African heritage, and her Western classical training. She is noted as the first African-American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. Her music has recently received renewed attention from both the public and the research community, decades after her death. In addition to other genres, Price was a prolific composer for solo voice and piano. Music historians have documented the existence of 134 art songs and piano/voice arrangements for spirituals and folk songs written by Price. We release a digital catalog of 112 of these works in MuseScore, MusicXML, MIDI, and PDF format. We also use this dataset to fine-tune a symbolic music generation model to generate accompaniments to melodies, and we conduct a blind listening experiment that shows that accompaniments generated by our model are perceived as being reflective of Florence Price's style more frequently than accompaniments generated by a baseline model. We release our model as the Florence Price Piano Accompaniment Generator alongside our dataset.