# CompLex: Music Theory Lexicon Constructed by Autonomous Agents for Automatic Music Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19603 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19603/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

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- [Automatic Analysis and Influence of Hierarchical Structure on Melody, Rhythm and Harmony in Popular Music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07518/) (2020)
- [MidiCaps: A large-scale MIDI dataset with text captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02255/) (2024)
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- [JEPOO: Highly Accurate Joint Estimation of Pitch, Onset and Offset for Music Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01304/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generative artificial intelligence in music has made significant strides, yet it still falls short of the substantial achievements seen in natural language processing, primarily due to the limited availability of music data. Knowledge-informed approaches have been shown to enhance the performance of music generation models, even when only a few pieces of musical knowledge are integrated. This paper seeks to leverage comprehensive music theory in AI-driven music generation tasks, such as algorithmic composition and style transfer, which traditionally require significant manual effort with existing techniques. We introduce a novel automatic music lexicon construction model that generates a lexicon, named CompLex, comprising 37,432 items derived from just 9 manually input category keywords and 5 sentence prompt templates. A new multi-agent algorithm is proposed to automatically detect and mitigate hallucinations. CompLex demonstrates impressive performance improvements across three state-of-the-art text-to-music generation models, encompassing both symbolic and audio-based methods. Furthermore, we evaluate CompLex in terms of completeness, accuracy, non-redundancy, and executability, confirming that it possesses the key characteristics of an effective lexicon.