# DeepRapper: Neural Rap Generation with Rhyme and Rhythm Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.01875 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01875/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [MASS: Masked Sequence to Sequence Pre-training for Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02450/) (2019)
- [PopMAG: Pop Music Accompaniment Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07703/) (2020)
- [SongMASS: Automatic Song Writing with Pre-training and Alignment Constraint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05168/) (2020)
- [Deep-speare: A Joint Neural Model of Poetic Language, Meter and Rhyme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03491/) (2018)
- [SongNet: Rigid Formats Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08022/) (2020)
- [Beyond Error Propagation in Neural Machine Translation: Characteristics of Language Also Matter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00120/) (2018)
- [DopeLearning: A Computational Approach to Rap Lyrics Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04771/) (2015)
- [Melody-Conditioned Lyrics Generation with SeqGANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14709/) (2020)
- [GPT-based Generation for Classical Chinese Poetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00151/) (2019)
- [A Syllable-Structured, Contextually-Based Conditionally Generation of Chinese Lyrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09322/) (2019)
- [Deep Poetry: A Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08212/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Pretrained Language Models for Text Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05273/) (2022)
- [DiffRhythm: Blazingly Fast and Embarrassingly Simple End-to-End Full-Length Song Generation with Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01183/) (2025)
- [ByGPT5: End-to-End Style-conditioned Poetry Generation with Token-free Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10474/) (2022)
- [PoeLM: A Meter- and Rhyme-Controllable Language Model for Unsupervised Poetry Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12206/) (2022)
- [TeleMelody: Lyric-to-Melody Generation with a Template-Based Two-Stage Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09617/) (2021)
- [TwistList: Resources and Baselines for Tongue Twister Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03457/) (2023)
- [Automatic Song Translation for Tonal Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13420/) (2022)
- [Songs Across Borders: Singable and Controllable Neural Lyric Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16816/) (2023)
- [SongComposer: A Large Language Model for Lyric and Melody Generation in Song Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17645/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Melody-to-Lyric Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19228/) (2023)
- [Re-creation of Creations: A New Paradigm for Lyric-to-Melody Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05697/) (2022)
- [PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06275/) (2022)
- [Translate the Beauty in Songs: Jointly Learning to Align Melody and Translate Lyrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15705/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Experience Inspired AI Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02427/) (2022)
- [SongRewriter: A Chinese Song Rewriting System with Controllable Content and Rhyme Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15037/) (2022)
- [Train & Constrain: Phonologically Informed Tongue-Twister Generation from Topics and Paraphrases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13901/) (2024)
- [Joint Learning of Wording and Formatting for Singable Melody-to-Lyric Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02146/) (2023)
- [Let the Poem Hit the Rhythm: Using a Byte-Based Transformer for Beat-Aligned Poetry Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10174/) (2024)
- [YOMI-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Kanji Reading and Phonological Understanding of LLMs for Japanese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00664/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Melody-Guided Lyrics Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07760/) (2023)
- [MCMChaos: Improvising Rap Music with MCMC Methods and Chaos Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07967/) (2024)
- [Encoder-Decoder Framework for Interactive Free Verses with Generation with Controllable High-Quality Rhyming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05176/) (2024)
- [Raply: A profanity-mitigated rap generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06941/) (2024)
- [P-CoT: A Pedagogically-motivated Participatory Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Phonological Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16656/) (2025)
- [Single-Sample Decoding of a Two-Layer Sound-Word Canvas Model for Thai Klon Pad](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14980/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rap generation, which aims to produce lyrics and corresponding singing beats, needs to model both rhymes and rhythms. Previous works for rap generation focused on rhyming lyrics but ignored rhythmic beats, which are important for rap performance. In this paper, we develop DeepRapper, a Transformer-based rap generation system that can model both rhymes and rhythms. Since there is no available rap dataset with rhythmic beats, we develop a data mining pipeline to collect a large-scale rap dataset, which includes a large number of rap songs with aligned lyrics and rhythmic beats. Second, we design a Transformer-based autoregressive language model which carefully models rhymes and rhythms. Specifically, we generate lyrics in the reverse order with rhyme representation and constraint for rhyme enhancement and insert a beat symbol into lyrics for rhythm/beat modeling. To our knowledge, DeepRapper is the first system to generate rap with both rhymes and rhythms. Both objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that DeepRapper generates creative and high-quality raps with rhymes and rhythms. Code will be released on GitHub.