REMAST: Real-time Emotion-based Music Arrangement with Soft Transition

Music as an emotional intervention medium has important applications in scenarios such as music therapy, games, and movies. However, music needs real-time arrangement according to changing emotions, bringing challenges to balance emotion real-time fit and soft emotion transition due to the fine-grained and mutable nature of the target emotion. Existing studies mainly focus on achieving emotion real-time fit, while the issue of smooth transition remains understudied, affecting the overall emotional coherence of the music. In this paper, we propose REMAST to address this trade-off. Specifically, we recognize the last timestep's music emotion and fuse it with the current timestep's input emotion. The fused emotion then guides REMAST to generate the music based on the input melody. To adjust music similarity and emotion real-time fit flexibly, we downsample the original melody and feed it into the generation model. Furthermore, we design four music theory features by domain knowledge to enhance emotion information and employ semi-supervised learning to mitigate the subjective bias introduced by manual dataset annotation. According to the evaluation results, REMAST surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in objective and subjective metrics. These results demonstrate that REMAST achieves real-time fit and smooth transition simultaneously, enhancing the coherence of the generated music.