Papers › A Bi-directional Transformer for Musical Chord Recognition

A Bi-directional Transformer for Musical Chord Recognition

5 Jul 2019arXiv:1907.02698archive 2025-07-28

Jonggwon Park, Kyoyun Choi, Sungwook Jeon, Dokyun Kim, Jonghun Park

Chord recognition is an important task since chords are highly abstract and descriptive features of music. For effective chord recognition, it is essential to utilize relevant context in audio sequence. While various machine learning models such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been employed for the task, most of them have limitations in capturing long-term dependency or require training of an additional model. In this work, we utilize a self-attention mechanism for chord recognition to focus on certain regions of chords. Training of the proposed bi-directional Transformer for chord recognition (BTC) consists of a single phase while showing competitive performance. Through an attention map analysis, we have visualized how attention was performed. It turns out that the model was able to divide segments of chords by utilizing adaptive receptive field of the attention mechanism. Furthermore, it was observed that the model was able to effectively capture long-term dependencies, making use of essential information regardless of distance.

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Code

jayg996/BTC-ISMIR19 officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
sakemin/cog-musicgen-chord mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
sakemin/musicgen-remixer mentioned on GitHubApache-2.0 report

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Chord RecognitionDescriptive

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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