# MELONS: generating melody with long-term structure using transformers and structure graph

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05020 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05020/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Using Sequences of Life-events to Predict Human Lives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03009/) (2023)
- [Compose & Embellish: Well-Structured Piano Performance Generation via A Two-Stage Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08212/) (2022)
- [A Review of Intelligent Music Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09124/) (2022)
- [MelodyGLM: Multi-task Pre-training for Symbolic Melody Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10738/) (2023)
- [Regeneration Learning: A Learning Paradigm for Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08846/) (2023)
- [Motifs, Phrases, and Beyond: The Modelling of Structure in Symbolic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07995/) (2024)
- [MeloForm: Generating Melody with Musical Form based on Expert Systems and Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14345/) (2022)
- [WuYun: Exploring hierarchical skeleton-guided melody generation using knowledge-enhanced deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04488/) (2023)
- [Graph-based Polyphonic Multitrack Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14928/) (2023)
- [BandCondiNet: Parallel Transformers-based Conditional Popular Music Generation with Multi-View Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10462/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-based Symbolic Music Generation with Structured State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20128/) (2025)
- [A Bird's-Eye Tutorial of Graph Attention Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02849/) (2022)
- [Motif-Centric Representation Learning for Symbolic Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10597/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Lead Sheet Generation via Semantic Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10772/) (2023)
- [Combinatorial music generation model with song structure graph analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15400/) (2023)
- [TOMI: Transforming and Organizing Music Ideas for Multi-Track Compositions with Full-Song Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23094/) (2025)
- [Fusing Memory and Attention: A study on LSTM, Transformer and Hybrid Architectures for Symbolic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21282/) (2026)
- [RPPNet: Perceptually-Grouped Rhythm-Pitch Primitives for Long-Term Structure Melody Generation via Boundary-Aware Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19776/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The creation of long melody sequences requires effective expression of coherent musical structure. However, there is no clear representation of musical structure. Recent works on music generation have suggested various approaches to deal with the structural information of music, but generating a full-song melody with clear long-term structure remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose MELONS, a melody generation framework based on a graph representation of music structure which consists of eight types of bar-level relations. MELONS adopts a multi-step generation method with transformer-based networks by factoring melody generation into two sub-problems: structure generation and structure conditional melody generation. Experimental results show that MELONS can produce structured melodies with high quality and rich contents.