Emotion-Guided Music Accompaniment Generation Based on Variational Autoencoder

Music accompaniment generation is a crucial aspect in the composition process. Deep neural networks have made significant strides in this field, but it remains a challenge for AI to effectively incorporate human emotions to create beautiful accompaniments. Existing models struggle to effectively characterize human emotions within neural network models while composing music. To address this issue, we propose the use of an easy-to-represent emotion flow model, the Valence/Arousal Curve, which allows for the compatibility of emotional information within the model through data transformation and enhances interpretability of emotional factors by utilizing a Variational Autoencoder as the model structure. Further, we used relative self-attention to maintain the structure of the music at music phrase level and to generate a richer accompaniment when combined with the rules of music theory. Our experimental results indicate that the emotional flow of the music generated by our model has a strong correlation with the input emotion, demonstrating the model's strong interpretability and control of emotional flow. The generated music is also well-structured, diverse, and dynamic, outperforming the baseline models.