MIDI-Informed Singing Accompaniment Generation in a Compositional Song Pipeline
Organizations: National Taiwan University · Taiwan AI Labs · University of Rochester
Abstract
While end-to-end lyrics-to-song models offer convenience for casual users, professional songwriters require score-to-song systems that allow them to retain authorship over the core melody. However, existing score-to-song methods are limited to short-form snippets and fail to maintain coherence in long-form generation, particularly during vocal-silent sections like intros and bridges. To address this long-form bottleneck, we propose MIDI-informed singing accompaniment generation (MIDI-SAG). Unlike conventional audio-only models, MIDI-SAG utilizes symbolic timing and chord information derived from the vocal MIDI to provide a stable musical roadmap. By incorporating structure planning, which defines temporal boundaries and semantic labels, our framework facilitates consistent generation across both vocal and non-vocal sections. We demonstrate the feasibility of this compositional pipeline by leveraging specialized pre-trained modules, enabling data-efficient training on a single GPU. Our experiments show the potential of this approach for both professional score-to-song and general lyrics-to-song tasks. While an early exploration, MIDI-SAG suggests a promising direction for structured, long-form music synthesis. Audio demos are available, and the code will be open-sourced at https://composerflow.github.io/web_revealed/.
Figures & tables
| Condition type | Training | Inference |
| beat | All-in-One ( Kim and Nam, 2023 ) | From generated vocal MIDI |
| pitch | RMVPE ( Wei et al., 2023 ) | RMVPE ( Wei et al., 2023 ) |
| chord | Chord detection ( Park et al., 2019 ) | Accomontage2 ( Yi et al., 2022 ) |
| structure | All-in-One ( Kim and Nam, 2023 ) | User-provided or by LLM |
| text prompt | Audio Flamingo 3 ( Goel et al., 2025 ) | User-provided or by LLM |
| reference audio | Mask one structure; others as reference | From previous song-structure segment |
| SAG Method | duration | Rhythm F1 | Key Acc. | CLAP | Coherence | Musicality | Memorability | Clarity | Naturalness |
| TTM with no vocal input | 47s | 0.2061 | 0.0650 | 0.3221 | 2.9056 | 2.8372 | 2.6813 | 2.7236 | 2.6762 |
| Audio-SAG (Figure 1 (a)) (simulating Melodist ( Hong et al., 2024 ) ) | 47s | 0.2216 | 0.1850 | 0.3064 | 2.9052 | 2.8348 | 2.6605 | 2.6613 | 2.6195 |
| MIDI-SAG 47s detected MIDI+Beat (Figure 1 (b)) | 47s | 0.6342 | 0.5550 | 0.2453 | 3.3032 | 3.1942 | 3.0425 | 3.0998 | 2.9353 |
| MIDI-SAG 47s (Figure 1 (c)) | 47s | 0.9534 | 0.7700 | 0.2387 | 3.5473 | 3.4055 | 3.2921 | 3.3306 | 3.1434 |
| MIDI-SAG 90—120s (Figure 1 (d)) | 90–120s | 0.9134 | 0.8200 | 0.2820 | 3.6480 | 3.3957 | 3.4355 | 3.4341 | 3.2500 |
| AnyAccomp | FastSAG | Our MIDI-SAG w/o ground truth vocal MIDI | |
| Training data (hrs) | 8k | 3k | 2.5k |
| Base generation length | 10s | 10s | 47s |
| Longer generation | |||
| Text control capability | |||
| APA ( Grachten and Nistal, 2025 ) | 0.457 | 0.000 | 0.595 |
| Model | Total Parameters | Training Data (hrs) | Audiobox | SongEval | |||||||||
| CLAP | PER | CE | CU | PC | PQ | Coherence | Musicality | Memorability | Clarity | Naturalness | |||
| Suno v4.5 | — | — | 0.417 | 0.290 | 7.339 | 7.766 | 5.333 | 8.036 | 4.198 | 4.011 | 4.174 | 4.034 | 3.939 |
| ACE-Step | 3.5B | 100K | 0.368 | 0.238 | 7.209 | 7.642 | 5.820 | 7.948 | 3.449 | 3.214 | 3.203 | 3.216 | 3.162 |
| DiffRhythm | 1.3B | 60K | 0.323 | 0.325 | 7.530 | 7.791 | 6.336 | 8.189 | 3.740 | 3.419 | 3.595 | 3.512 | 3.354 |
| LeVo | 2B | 110K | 0.229 | 0.617 | 7.565 | 7.674 | 4.993 | 8.295 | 3.392 | 3.272 | 3.198 | 3.265 | 3.155 |
| Ours | 1.3B | 2.5K | 0.282 | 0.213 | 7.590 | 7.712 | 6.294 | 8.240 | 3.648 | 3.396 | 3.436 | 3.434 | 3.250 |
| Model | Overall Preference | Lyrics Adherence | Musicality | Voice Naturalness | Structure Clarity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Suno v4.5 | 4.297 0.194 | 4.375 0.188 | 4.344 0.201 | 4.188 0.195 | 4.297 0.184 |
| ACE-Step | 2.953 0.249 | 3.656 0.244 | 3.172 0.271 | 2.672 0.280 | 3.266 0.252 |
| DiffRhythm | 2.469 0.231 | 2.922 0.192 | 2.859 0.235 | 2.703 0.238 | 2.688 0.239 |
| LeVo | 2.297 0.275 | 2.188 0.239 | 2.641 0.256 | 2.484 0.262 | 2.531 0.235 |
| Ours | 2.656 0.287 | 3.672 0.243 | 2.703 0.242 | 3.109 0.270 | 2.516 0.262 |
| Setting | Chord F1 | Key Acc | Rhythm F1 |
| w/ all conditions | 0.9006 | 0.79 | 0.8339 |
| w/o chord | 0.3908 | 0.21 | 0.7870 |
| w/o rhythm | 0.8914 | 0.79 | 0.4279 |
| w/o structure | 0.8957 | 0.79 | 0.8317 |
| w/o audio | 0.9027 | 0.84 | 0.8442 |
| w/o vocal pitch contour | 0.5930 | 0.69 | 0.4319 |
| Model | Vocal MIDI generation | Score-to- song | Lyrics-to- song | Max length |
| Melodist ( Hong et al., 2024 ) | 10s | |||
| MelodyLM ( Li et al., 2024 ) | 12s | |||
| VersBand ( Zhang et al., 2025c ) | 12s | |||
| Ours | 90–120s | |||
| Diffrhythm ( Ning et al., 2025 ) | 285s | |||
| ACE-Step ( Gong et al., 2025 ) | 280s |
Appendix figures & tables6 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Module | Time (s) |
| Lyrics-to-melody | 10 |
| Melody harmonization | 0.2 |
| Singing voice synthesis | 3 |
| Singing accompaniment generation | 40 |
| Method | FD | KL | CLAP | Smoothness |
| MuseControlLite | 111.58 | 0.2160 | 0.3622 | -0.2734 |
| MuseControlLite w/ unfrozen self-attention layers | 109.62 | 0.1794 | 0.3961 | -0.3529 |
| Stage | Component | Base model / source | Upstream training (prior work) | Our additional training (this work) |
| 1 | Lyrics Vocal MIDI | CSL-L2M ( Chai and Wang, 2025 ) | 300 hours lyrics–melody pairs; trained with 1 V100 for 24 hours | None |
| 2 | SVS (MIDI vocals) | FastSpeech ( Ren et al., 2020 ) | None | 10 h licensed internal (2 singers); GPU: 1 3090 for 8 days; trained from scratch |
| 3 | Backing generator backbone | Stable Audio Open ( Evans et al., 2025 ) | 7.3k hours licensed data; 36224 A100 GPU hours (VAE + Diffusion Transformer) | None |
| 3b | MIDI-SAG conditioning module (adapter) | MuseControlLite | None | 2.5k h Mandarin pop; GPU: 1 3090 for 9 days |
| 4 | Harmony / chord extraction or harmonization | AccoMontage2 ( Yi et al., 2022 ) | None; template matching and dynamic programming | None |
| 5 | Beat / tempo tracking (for silent spans) | Heydari and Duan (2022) | None | 2.5k h Mandarin pop; GPU: 1 3090 for 12 hours |