MIDI2vec: Learning MIDI Embeddings for Reliable Prediction of Symbolic Music Metadata

Tracking #: 2844-4058

Authors: 
Pasquale Lisena
Albert Meroño-Peñuela
Raphael Troncy

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors DeepL4KGs 2021

Submission type: 
Full Paper
Abstract: 
An important problem in large symbolic music collections is the low availability of high-quality metadata, which is essential for various information retrieval tasks. Traditionally, systems have addressed this by relying either on costly human annotations or on rule-based systems at a limited scale. Recently, embedding strategies have been exploited for representing latent factors in graphs of connected nodes. In this work, we propose MIDI2vec, a new approach for representing MIDI files as vectors based on graph embedding techniques. Our strategy consists of representing the MIDI data as a graph, including the information about tempo, time signature, programs and notes. Next, we run and optimise node2vec for generating embeddings using random walks in the graph. We demonstrate that the resulting vectors can successfully be employed for predicting the musical genre and other metadata such as the composer, the instrument or the movement. In particular, we conduct experiments using those vectors as input to a Feed-Forward Neural Network and we report good comparable accuracy scores in the prediction with respect to other approaches relying purely on symbolic music, avoiding feature engineering and producing highly scalable and reusable models with low dimensionality. Our proposal has real-world applications in automated metadata tagging for symbolic music, for example in digital libraries for musicology, datasets for machine learning, and knowledge graph completion.
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Decision/Status: 
Accept

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Review #1
Anonymous submitted on 28/Jul/2021
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

This manuscript was submitted as 'full paper' and should be reviewed along the usual dimensions for research contributions which include (1) originality, (2) significance of the results, and (3) quality of writing. Please also assess the data file provided by the authors under “Long-term stable URL for resources”. In particular, assess (A) whether the data file is well organized and in particular contains a README file which makes it easy for you to assess the data, (B) whether the provided resources appear to be complete for replication of experiments, and if not, why, (C) whether the chosen repository, if it is not GitHub, Figshare or Zenodo, is appropriate for long-term repository discoverability, and (4) whether the provided data artifacts are complete. Please refer to the reviewer instructions and the FAQ for further information.

Review #2
Anonymous submitted on 04/Aug/2021
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

All my comments have been properly addressed

Review #3
By Lyndon Nixon submitted on 20/Aug/2021
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

I have reviewed the updated paper as well as the authors' comments to the reviewers. I am satisfied that the authors have resolved all of my concerns in their updated submission.