Papers › MelodyGLM: Multi-task Pre-training for Symbolic Melody Generation

MelodyGLM: Multi-task Pre-training for Symbolic Melody Generation

19 Sep 2023arXiv:2309.10738archive 2025-07-28

Xinda Wu, Zhijie Huang, Kejun Zhang, Jiaxing Yu, Xu Tan, Tieyao Zhang, ZiHao Wang, Lingyun Sun

Pre-trained language models have achieved impressive results in various music understanding and generation tasks. However, existing pre-training methods for symbolic melody generation struggle to capture multi-scale, multi-dimensional structural information in note sequences, due to the domain knowledge discrepancy between text and music. Moreover, the lack of available large-scale symbolic melody datasets limits the pre-training improvement. In this paper, we propose MelodyGLM, a multi-task pre-training framework for generating melodies with long-term structure. We design the melodic n-gram and long span sampling strategies to create local and global blank infilling tasks for modeling the local and global structures in melodies. Specifically, we incorporate pitch n-grams, rhythm n-grams, and their combined n-grams into the melodic n-gram blank infilling tasks for modeling the multi-dimensional structures in melodies. To this end, we have constructed a large-scale symbolic melody dataset, MelodyNet, containing more than 0.4 million melody pieces. MelodyNet is utilized for large-scale pre-training and domain-specific n-gram lexicon construction. Both subjective and objective evaluations demonstrate that MelodyGLM surpasses the standard and previous pre-training methods. In particular, subjective evaluations show that, on the melody continuation task, MelodyGLM gains average improvements of 0.82, 0.87, 0.78, and 0.94 in consistency, rhythmicity, structure, and overall quality, respectively. Notably, MelodyGLM nearly matches the quality of human-composed melodies on the melody inpainting task.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

NEXTLab-ZJU/MelodyGLM officialmentioned in paper 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.

Tasks

Rhythm

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

MelodyNet

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Inpainting

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