# The Jazz Transformer on the Front Line: Exploring the Shortcomings of AI-composed Music through Quantitative Measures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.01307 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01307/

## Key facts

- Cited by 53 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Aug 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Compound Word Transformer: Learning to Compose Full-Song Music over Dynamic Directed Hypergraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02402/) (2021)
- [MuseMorphose: Full-Song and Fine-Grained Piano Music Style Transfer with One Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04090/) (2021)
- [Video2Music: Suitable Music Generation from Videos using an Affective Multimodal Transformer model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00968/) (2023)
- [Foundation Models for Music: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14340/) (2024)
- [Multitrack Music Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06983/) (2022)
- [Vision+X: A Survey on Multimodal Learning in the Light of Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02884/) (2022)
- [Compose & Embellish: Well-Structured Piano Performance Generation via A Two-Stage Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08212/) (2022)
- [The Ethical Implications of Generative Audio Models: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05527/) (2023)
- [PDMX: A Large-Scale Public Domain MusicXML Dataset for Symbolic Music Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10831/) (2024)
- [Frechet Music Distance: A Metric For Generative Symbolic Music Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07948/) (2024)
- [Variable-Length Music Score Infilling via XLNet and Musically Specialized Positional Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05064/) (2021)
- [BERT-like Pre-training for Symbolic Piano Music Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05223/) (2021)
- [PianoBART: Symbolic Piano Music Generation and Understanding with Large-Scale Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03361/) (2024)
- [Structure-Enhanced Pop Music Generation via Harmony-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06441/) (2021)
- [GTR-CTRL: Instrument and Genre Conditioning for Guitar-Focused Music Generation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05393/) (2023)
- [Natural Language Processing Methods for Symbolic Music Generation and Information Retrieval: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17467/) (2024)
- [Survey on the Evaluation of Generative Models in Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05104/) (2025)
- [Composer's Assistant: An Interactive Transformer for Multi-Track MIDI Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12525/) (2023)
- [Structured Multi-Track Accompaniment Arrangement via Style Prior Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16334/) (2023)
- [ComMU: Dataset for Combinatorial Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09385/) (2022)
- [Conditional Drums Generation using Compound Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04464/) (2022)
- [YM2413-MDB: A Multi-Instrumental FM Video Game Music Dataset with Emotion Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07131/) (2022)
- [The Power of Fragmentation: A Hierarchical Transformer Model for Structural Segmentation in Symbolic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08579/) (2022)
- [Structure-informed Positional Encoding for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13301/) (2024)
- [Composer's Assistant 2: Interactive Multi-Track MIDI Infilling with Fine-Grained User Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14700/) (2024)
- [Melody Infilling with User-Provided Structural Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02829/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Music Generation from Single-Modal, Cross-Modal, and Multi-Modal Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00837/) (2025)
- [Music Score Expansion with Variable-Length Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06046/) (2021)
- [An Comparative Analysis of Different Pitch and Metrical Grid Encoding Methods in the Task of Sequential Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13383/) (2023)
- [From Words to Music: A Study of Subword Tokenization Techniques in Symbolic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08953/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents the Jazz Transformer, a generative model that utilizes a neural sequence model called the Transformer-XL for modeling lead sheets of Jazz music. Moreover, the model endeavors to incorporate structural events present in the Weimar Jazz Database (WJazzD) for inducing structures in the generated music. While we are able to reduce the training loss to a low value, our listening test suggests however a clear gap between the average ratings of the generated and real compositions. We therefore go one step further and conduct a series of computational analysis of the generated compositions from different perspectives. This includes analyzing the statistics of the pitch class, grooving, and chord progression, assessing the structureness of the music with the help of the fitness scape plot, and evaluating the model's understanding of Jazz music through a MIREX-like continuation prediction task. Our work presents in an analytical manner why machine-generated music to date still falls short of the artwork of humanity, and sets some goals for future work on automatic composition to further pursue.