# Symbolic Music Representations for Classification Tasks: A Systematic Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02567 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02567/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Foundation Models for Music: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14340/) (2024)
- [DExter: Learning and Controlling Performance Expression with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14850/) (2024)
- [Natural Language Processing Methods for Symbolic Music Generation and Information Retrieval: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17467/) (2024)
- [Bridging Paintings and Music -- Exploring Emotion based Music Generation through Paintings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07827/) (2024)
- [GraphMuse: A Library for Symbolic Music Graph Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12671/) (2024)
- [Perception-Inspired Graph Convolution for Music Understanding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09224/) (2024)
- [Towards Explainable and Interpretable Musical Difficulty Estimation: A Parameter-efficient Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00473/) (2024)
- [From Generality to Mastery: Composer-Style Symbolic Music Generation via Large-Scale Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17497/) (2025)
- [BeatEdit: Symbolic Music Generation as Explicit Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11124/) (2026)
- [PBSCR: The Piano Bootleg Score Composer Recognition Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16803/) (2024)
- [Analyzing Byte-Pair Encoding on Monophonic and Polyphonic Symbolic Music: A Focus on Musical Phrase Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01448/) (2024)
- [Style-based Composer Identification and Attribution of Symbolic Music Scores: a Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12440/) (2025)
- [MUSE-Explainer: Counterfactual Explanations for Symbolic Music Graph Classification Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26521/) (2025)
- [Go witheFlow: Real-time Emotion Driven Audio Effects Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02171/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) has seen a recent surge in deep learning-based approaches, which often involve encoding symbolic music (i.e., music represented in terms of discrete note events) in an image-like or language like fashion. However, symbolic music is neither an image nor a sentence, and research in the symbolic domain lacks a comprehensive overview of the different available representations. In this paper, we investigate matrix (piano roll), sequence, and graph representations and their corresponding neural architectures, in combination with symbolic scores and performances on three piece-level classification tasks. We also introduce a novel graph representation for symbolic performances and explore the capability of graph representations in global classification tasks. Our systematic evaluation shows advantages and limitations of each input representation. Our results suggest that the graph representation, as the newest and least explored among the three approaches, exhibits promising performance, while being more light-weight in training.