Composer Classification With Cross-Modal Transfer Learning and Musically-Informed Augmentation
Daniel Z. Yang, Tsai, Timothy · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2021
This paper studies composer style classification of piano sheet music, MIDI, and audio data. We expand upon previous work in three ways. First, we explore several musically motivated data augmentation schemes based on pitch-shifting and random removal of individual notes or groups of notes. We show that these augmentation schemes lead to dramatic improvements in model performance, of a magnitude that exceeds the benefit of pretraining on all solo piano sheet music images in IMSLP. Second, we describe a way to modify previous models in order to enable cross-model transfer learning, in which a model trained entirely on sheet music can be used to perform composer classification of audio or MIDI data. Third, we explore the performance of trained models in a 1-shot learning context, in which the model performs classification among a set of composers that are unseen in training. Our results indicate that models learn a representation of compositional style that generalizes beyond the set of composers used in training.