🎵 Music LSTM — Symbolic Piano Generation

A Stacked LSTM + Attention model for symbolic piano music generation, trained on 46 million musical events from ~12,000 MIDI files.

Built from scratch as part of the CodeAlpha AI Internship (Task 3) — no pre-trained model, no external API, just raw deep learning on MIDI data.

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Model Description

The model treats music generation as a next-token prediction problem — the same principle behind language models like GPT, applied to piano music.

Each musical event is encoded as a single token representing three attributes simultaneously:

• Pitch — MIDI note value (0–127)
• Duration — discretized into 10 musical buckets (thirty-second → whole note)
• Velocity — discretized into 8 classical nuance buckets (ppp → fff)

The model learns to predict the next token given a sequence of 64 past tokens, then generates music autoregressively.

Architecture

Token sequence (64 tokens)
        │
        ▼
Embedding (vocab_size=6543, dim=256)
        │
        ▼
LSTM Layer 1 (hidden=1024)   ← local patterns: intervals, rhythm
        │
        ▼
LSTM Layer 2 (hidden=1024)   ← higher-level patterns: phrases, motifs
        │
        ▼
Attention (additive, Bahdanau-style)
        │
        ▼
Linear → Softmax (6543 classes)
        │
        ▼
Next token prediction

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Training Data

Both datasets consist of professional and semi-professional solo piano recordings in classical style, ensuring a consistent musical domain.

Preprocessing used symusic (C++ MIDI parser) for fast extraction of pitch, duration, and velocity attributes from raw MIDI files.

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Training

Trained on Kaggle 2×T4 GPUs (30GB VRAM total) using torch.nn.DataParallel.

Results

Best checkpoint: epoch 8, val_loss = 5.805

Random baseline: ln(6543) ≈ 8.78 — the model significantly outperforms random prediction.

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Usage

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/Tahsine/CodeAlpha_Music_Generation
cd CodeAlpha_Music_Generation
pip install -r requirements.txt

The model weights are downloaded automatically from this repo on first run:

# Generate MIDI (256 notes, temperature=0.9)
python generate.py

# Full options
python generate.py \
    --n_tokens    512 \
    --temperature 0.9 \
    --bpm         120 \
    --output      artifacts/my_music.mid \
    --device      cpu

Generate MIDI + WAV

# Install FluidSynth
sudo apt-get install fluidsynth   # Linux
brew install fluidsynth            # macOS

# Generate audio — soundfont (~30MB) downloads automatically
python generate.py --n_tokens 512 --temperature 0.9 --audio

Temperature guide

Load model directly in Python

import torch
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

# Download weights
model_path = hf_hub_download(
    repo_id="KalineZephyr/music-lstm-midi-codealpha",
    filename="best_model.pt",
)

# Load checkpoint
ckpt = torch.load(model_path, map_location="cpu")
print(f"Best epoch : {ckpt['epoch']}")
print(f"Val loss   : {ckpt['val_loss']:.4f}")
print(f"Config     : {ckpt['config']}")

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Limitations

• Short-range coherence only — LSTM memory is limited to ~50–100 tokens. The model generates locally coherent phrases but lacks long-range structure (no recurring themes, no global form).
• Piano only — trained exclusively on solo piano data. Other instruments will produce poor results.
• Classical/romantic style — dataset bias toward Western classical music.
• No rhythm quantization — generated durations are discretized into 10 buckets, which may sound mechanical compared to human performance.

These limitations are inherent to LSTM-based sequence models. A Transformer architecture with full self-attention would address the long-range coherence issue.

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Repository

GitHub: Tahsine/CodeAlpha_Music_Generation

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License

MIT