Generative Modeling of Bach-Style Symbolic Music: A Comparative Study of Autoregressive, Latent-Variable, and Adversarial Approaches (opens in new tab)

We study generative modeling of Bach-style symbolic piano music using a shared MIDI corpus and three model families: autoregressive LSTMs with attention, latent-variable models including recurrent VAEs and vector-quantized VAEs, and generative adversarial networks. We compare their ability to model polyphonic note sequences, learn useful latent representations, and generate stylistically coherent compositions. Our experiments show that the a...