In harmony with gpt-oss

Large language models can produce superficially legal twelve-tone scores that collapse into degenerate textures. We introduce a neuro-symbolic harness that wraps a language-model proposer in a generate-verify-repair-trace loop with symbolic verification. The complete pipeline improves event-local consistency without claiming whole-piece legality. Across 40 controlled tasks and four paired models, constraint-checked delivery rises from 13.3% under raw generation to 48.1% with the harness; it abstains on the remaining 51.9% of runs. The pass rate of a narrower collision and serialisation-consistency check rises from 33.5% to 58.3%, while degeneracy remains near 0.05, including under adversarial prompting. A blinded evaluation by five experts also shows a descriptive aggregate preference for harness candidates over raw generation in adherence, perceived legality, coherence, and overall quality.

We present ScorePrompts, an interactive system in which users upload a score, receive natural-language descriptions of its musical structure, ask questions about specific passages, and inspect the corresponding analysis results in staff notation. Specialist MIR components first estimate harmony, tonality, cadences, formal boundaries, texture, and note-level roles, organizing their outputs at note, beat, measure, and piece levels. A schema-constrained language model converts these results into descriptions rather than inferring musical structure directly from raw MusicXML. For questions such as "What changes in measures 14-18?", a deterministic router selects the relevant measures and analytical levels and returns a concise response together with the underlying results and caveats. Verovio renders the score and links the returned information to cited measures and note-level attributes. The interface also exposes intermediate tables and disagreements between analytical levels. ScorePrompts is intended for exploratory score analysis and explanation, not score editing. The demo shows how existing analysis models, constrained language generation, Q&A retrieval, and notation-based visualization can provide natural-language access to symbolic music analysis while keeping intermediate results inspectable.

Scoring open-ended music analysis responses is time-consuming and requires nuanced judgments of harmonic knowledge and formal understanding. This study evaluates the validity and repeatability of GPT-4o-mini for rubric-based scoring of music analysis essays, using teacher mean scores as the benchmark. A dataset of 300 university-level student responses was scored by teachers on four dimensions: Harmony, Form, Reasoning, and Terminology. GPT-4o-mini scored the same responses using three prompting strategies: few-shot prompting with chain-of-thought reasoning (Fs+CoT), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and self-consistency based on five internal generations per administration (SC). Each strategy was administered three times with the model, prompt, rubric, and response held constant. Single-pass scores represented an operational scoring condition, whereas median aggregation across three runs was used to examine robustness. Agreement with teacher mean scores was evaluated using correlation, intraclass correlation, Krippendorff's alpha, quadratic weighted kappa, and scoring error indices. Fs+CoT showed the strongest agreement with teacher mean scores in both single-pass scoring and median aggregation. RAG showed systematic over-scoring, whereas SC produced highly repeatable scores but weaker individual-level agreement. Dimension-level analyses showed that scoring performance varied across rubric components, with Terminology generally showing weaker agreement than Reasoning. These findings indicate that GPT-4o-mini can generate stable scores for complex music analysis responses, but prompting strategies produce distinct scoring profiles. Operational use therefore requires strategy-specific calibration, dimension-level validation, and continued human oversight.