# Deep learning for music generation. Four approaches and their comparative evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02586 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02586/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Music Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04281/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces four different artificial intelligence algorithms for music generation and aims to compare these methods not only based on the aesthetic quality of the generated music but also on their suitability for specific applications. The first set of melodies is produced by a slightly modified visual transformer neural network that is used as a language model. The second set of melodies is generated by combining chat sonification with a classic transformer neural network (the same method of music generation is presented in a previous research), the third set of melodies is generated by combining the Schillinger rhythm theory together with a classic transformer neural network, and the fourth set of melodies is generated using GPT3 transformer provided by OpenAI. A comparative analysis is performed on the melodies generated by these approaches and the results indicate that significant differences can be observed between them and regarding the aesthetic value of them, GPT3 produced the most pleasing melodies, and the newly introduced Schillinger method proved to generate better sounding music than previous sonification methods.