Papers › JamBot: Music Theory Aware Chord Based Generation of Polyphonic Music with LSTMs

JamBot: Music Theory Aware Chord Based Generation of Polyphonic Music with LSTMs

21 Nov 2017arXiv:1711.07682archive 2025-07-28

Gino Brunner, Yuyi Wang, Roger Wattenhofer, Jonas Wiesendanger

We propose a novel approach for the generation of polyphonic music based on LSTMs. We generate music in two steps. First, a chord LSTM predicts a chord progression based on a chord embedding. A second LSTM then generates polyphonic music from the predicted chord progression. The generated music sounds pleasing and harmonic, with only few dissonant notes. It has clear long-term structure that is similar to what a musician would play during a jam session. We show that our approach is sensible from a music theory perspective by evaluating the learned chord embeddings. Surprisingly, our simple model managed to extract the circle of fifths, an important tool in music theory, from the dataset.

PaperPDFCode

Code

brunnergino/JamBot officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

LSTMSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections