# miditok: A Python package for MIDI file tokenization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17202/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [AudioGen: Textually Guided Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15352/) (2022)
- [Diffsound: Discrete Diffusion Model for Text-to-sound Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09983/) (2022)
- [Enabling Factorized Piano Music Modeling and Generation with the MAESTRO Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12247/) (2018)
- [MuseGAN: Multi-track Sequential Generative Adversarial Networks for Symbolic Music Generation and Accompaniment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06298/) (2017)
- [Compound Word Transformer: Learning to Compose Full-Song Music over Dynamic Directed Hypergraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02402/) (2021)
- [DeepBach: a Steerable Model for Bach Chorales Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01010/) (2016)
- [MusicBERT: Symbolic Music Understanding with Large-Scale Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05630/) (2021)
- [MT3: Multi-Task Multitrack Music Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03017/) (2021)
- [This Time with Feeling: Learning Expressive Musical Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03715/) (2018)
- [PopMAG: Pop Music Accompaniment Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07703/) (2020)
- [LakhNES: Improving multi-instrumental music generation with cross-domain pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04868/) (2019)
- [MMM : Exploring Conditional Multi-Track Music Generation with the Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06048/) (2020)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Piano Transcription with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09142/) (2021)
- [MusPy: A Toolkit for Symbolic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01951/) (2020)
- [GiantMIDI-Piano: A large-scale MIDI dataset for classical piano music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07061/) (2020)
- [Symphony Generation with Permutation Invariant Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05448/) (2022)
- [The Piano Inpainting Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05944/) (2021)
- [Byte Pair Encoding for Symbolic Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11975/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Foundation Models for Music: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14340/) (2024)
- [Text2midi: Generating Symbolic Music from Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16526/) (2024)
- [Natural Language Processing Methods for Symbolic Music Generation and Information Retrieval: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17467/) (2024)
- [The GigaMIDI Dataset with Features for Expressive Music Performance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17726/) (2025)
- [GraphMuse: A Library for Symbolic Music Graph Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12671/) (2024)
- [PerTok: Expressive Encoding and Modeling of Symbolic Musical Ideas and Variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02060/) (2024)
- [SyMuPe: Affective and Controllable Symbolic Music Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03425/) (2025)
- [BEAT: Tokenizing and Generating Symbolic Music by Uniform Temporal Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19532/) (2026)
- [Annotation-free Automatic Music Transcription with Scalable Synthetic Data and Adversarial Domain Confusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10402/) (2023)
- [Adaptable Symbolic Music Infilling with MIDI-RWKV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13001/) (2025)
- [Optical Music Recognition of Jazz Lead Sheets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05329/) (2025)
- [Perception-Inspired Graph Convolution for Music Understanding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09224/) (2024)
- [Music Proofreading with RefinPaint: Where and How to Modify Compositions given Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09099/) (2024)
- [TheGlueNote: Learned Representations for Robust and Flexible Note Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04309/) (2024)
- [Symbotunes: unified hub for symbolic music generative models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20515/) (2024)
- [Fretting-Transformer: Encoder-Decoder Model for MIDI to Tablature Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14223/) (2025)
- [On the de-duplication of the Lakh MIDI dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16662/) (2025)
- [BeatEdit: Symbolic Music Generation as Explicit Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11124/) (2026)
- [Analyzing Byte-Pair Encoding on Monophonic and Polyphonic Symbolic Music: A Focus on Musical Phrase Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01448/) (2024)
- [MidiTok Visualizer: a tool for visualization and analysis of tokenized MIDI symbolic music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20518/) (2024)
- [A Traditional Approach to Symbolic Piano Continuation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12267/) (2025)
- [Disentangling Score Content and Performance Style for Joint Piano Rendering and Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23878/) (2025)
- [LadderSym: A Multimodal Interleaved Transformer for Music Practice Error Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08580/) (2025)
- [PianoKontext: Expressive Performance Rendering from Deadpan Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12282/) (2026)
- [Closing the Loop: PID Feedback Control for Interpretable Activation Steering in Symbolic Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18790/) (2026)
- [RPPNet: Perceptually-Grouped Rhythm-Pitch Primitives for Long-Term Structure Melody Generation via Boundary-Aware Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19776/) (2026)
- [From One-Shot Generation to Incremental Music Composition: Adapting a General-Purpose Instruction LLM for Persistent Symbolic Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34994/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress in natural language processing has been adapted to the symbolic music modality. Language models, such as Transformers, have been used with symbolic music for a variety of tasks among which music generation, modeling or transcription, with state-of-the-art performances. These models are beginning to be used in production products. To encode and decode music for the backbone model, they need to rely on tokenizers, whose role is to serialize music into sequences of distinct elements called tokens. MidiTok is an open-source library allowing to tokenize symbolic music with great flexibility and extended features. It features the most popular music tokenizations, under a unified API. It is made to be easily used and extensible for everyone.