# Six Dragons Fly Again: Reviving 15th-Century Korean Court Music with Transformers and Novel Encoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.01096 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01096/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2024.

## 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)
- [Mixed Precision Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03740/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03122/) (2017)
- [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)
- [PopMAG: Pop Music Accompaniment Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07703/) (2020)
- [VampNet: Music Generation via Masked Acoustic Token Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04686/) (2023)
- [Museformer: Transformer with Fine- and Coarse-Grained Attention for Music Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10349/) (2022)
- [Counterpoint by Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07227/) (2019)
- [Theme Transformer: Symbolic Music Generation with Theme-Conditioned Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04093/) (2021)
- [Music transcription modelling and composition using deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.08723/) (2016)
- [A Domain-Knowledge-Inspired Music Embedding Space and a Novel Attention Mechanism for Symbolic Music Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00973/) (2022)
- [MG-VAE: Deep Chinese Folk Songs Generation with Specific Regional Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13287/) (2019)
- [Generating Coherent Drum Accompaniment With Fills And Improvisations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00291/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [KuiSCIMA v2.0: Improved Baselines, Calibration, and Cross-Notation Generalization for Historical Chinese Music Notations in Jiang Kui's Baishidaoren Gequ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18741/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a project that revives a piece of 15th-century Korean court music, Chihwapyeong and Chwipunghyeong, composed upon the poem Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven. One of the earliest examples of Jeongganbo, a Korean musical notation system, the remaining version only consists of a rudimentary melody. Our research team, commissioned by the National Gugak (Korean Traditional Music) Center, aimed to transform this old melody into a performable arrangement for a six-part ensemble. Using Jeongganbo data acquired through bespoke optical music recognition, we trained a BERT-like masked language model and an encoder-decoder transformer model. We also propose an encoding scheme that strictly follows the structure of Jeongganbo and denotes note durations as positions. The resulting machine-transformed version of Chihwapyeong and Chwipunghyeong were evaluated by experts and performed by the Court Music Orchestra of National Gugak Center. Our work demonstrates that generative models can successfully be applied to traditional music with limited training data if combined with careful design.