Multi-Instrument Music Transcription

Machine learning tools have significantly aided automatic piano music transcription; however, this domain has focused primarily on accurately predicting the pitches and timings of played notes. To produce sheet music for the piano, notes must be separated into two staves, one for each hand, and good sheet music often contains fingering annotations to guide the player when sight-reading or learning fast or complex pieces. We propose 8 statistical approaches for combined hand and fingering annotation of transcribed piano notes, including baseline hidden Markov models, rule-based methods, a synthesis of existing approaches, and N-gram language models. Furthermore, we develop a pipeline for complete transcription from piano audio to fingering-annotated sheet music. Evaluations with the PIG dataset demonstrate that our Synthesis model achieves a hand separation accuracy of 90.8% and a joint hand and finger annotation accuracy of 56.6%. These approaches serve as a new baseline for further research into this problem, while our pipeline demonstrates the feasibility of a combined system for automated note transcription, hand separation, and fingering annotation.

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) for guitar remains limited by three challenges: existing systems often fail to capture expressive techniques such as slides, bends, and percussive hits; they often assign notes to incorrect string-fret combinations; and they are typically trained on clean recordings, limiting their generalization to noisy real-world audio. To address these challenges, we propose TART, a modular four-stage audio-to-tablature pipeline consisting of (1) an audio-to-MIDI transcription model, (2) an expressive technique classifier, (3) an audio-conditioned T5 encoder-decoder for string-fret assignment, and (4) an automated tablature generator. We evaluate TART in a zero-shot setting on GuitarSet, EGDB, and two augmented benchmarks, Noisy GuitarSet and Noisy EGDB. Averaged across these four benchmarks, TART achieves 81.35% audio-to-MIDI F50 (+6.67 points over the best prior baseline), 71.8% string-fret Tab F1 (+8.5 points over the best prior baseline), and 54.08% end-to-end Tab F1. To our knowledge, TART is the first framework to generate guitar tablature with both fingering and expressive technique annotations directly from guitar audio.

Guitar tablature transcription requires not only accurate pitch detection but also assigning each note to a specific string-fret position, as the same pitch can be played at multiple fretboard positions. Existing approaches treat this as a standard classification problem, ignoring the musical and physical constraints that govern playable fingering sequences. We propose Noise2Fret, a diffusion model for audio-to-tablature transcription that generates tablature through a continuous latent representation of discrete fret and string targets, conditioned on spectral and audio features. To bridge the gap between pitch accuracy and physical playability, we introduce five auxiliary losses encoding Pitch-Class Distance, Positional Distance, Circle-of-Fifths Distance, String Similarity, and Hand-Span Feasibility directly into the training objective. Experiments on GuitarSet and GOAT datasets demonstrate that the model outperforms baselines while remaining computationally more efficient, and that the auxiliary losses yield consistent gains over the standard training objective.

Optical music recognition (OMR) transcribes music scores into digital formats. While the field has advanced significantly on monophonic and piano-form scores, multi-part score transcription remains underexplored, largely due to the absence of a suitable dataset. We introduce OpenScore String Quartet for Optical Music Recognition (OSSQ-OMR), the first dataset dedicated to multi-part OMR. Built on the OpenScore String Quartet corpus, OSSQ-OMR pairs digitally encoded scores with their original scanned editions from IMSLP, with all images visually aligned to their transcriptions. The dataset is released with score images at system and staff levels, and paired transcriptions in three encoding formats: Extended Linearized MusicXML (LMXE), **kern, and ABC. In total, OSSQ-OMR contains 24,544 system images and 98,172 staff images drawn from 116 string quartet scores. We accompany the dataset with a benchmark protocol and baseline results from two representative OMR models, evaluated across four random score-level splits with mutually exclusive test sets. Baselines reach OMR-NED as low as 3.6% on synthetic and 5.9% on scanned inputs; results reveal substantial effects of encoding and segmentation choices, with the LSTM-based baseline degrading on scanned inputs roughly 2.6 times less than the Transformer-based baseline.

Audio-based piano transcription performs well on onset, pitch, and velocity, but the sustain pedal lets sound persist long after key release, so audio systems predict pedal-extended offsets rather than physical key release. Yet existing Visual Piano Transcription (VPT) systems focus on onset detection from short video windows, offset accuracy lags onset by a wide margin, and note-level velocity has not been reported. To address these gaps, we present V2N (Video to Notes), the first complete VPT system: a shared temporal backbone feeds task-specific heads for onset, offset, key hold, and velocity, jointly trained with per-frame supervision rather than only at the window center. Ablations show that multi-task supervision enables offset and velocity prediction while improving onset accuracy; longer temporal context yields further improvements. V2N sets new state-of-the-art results on PianoVAM and R3.

Automatic Drum Transcription (ADT) is commonly formulated as a direct mapping from a music mixture to symbolic drum events. While effective for transcription, this formulation discards the acoustic stems that are useful for editing, remixing, and production. We revisit an alternative separate-and-detect formulation, where a drum source separation front end first produces five editable drum stems, and a fixed onset detector then converts each stem into symbolic events. The separator is built on a five-stem latent diffusion model that jointly generates kick, snare, toms, hi-hats, and cymbals in a compact VAE latent space. We further study two training-only auxiliary branches--an onset branch (OB) and a timbre branch (TB)--which shape the separator during learning but are discarded at inference. Trained on synthetic drum multitracks and evaluated on MDB Drums and ENST-Drums, the proposed pipeline consistently improves over a strong U-Net-based drum separation baseline in overall transcription F1. It also outperforms a representative end-to-end ADT system on kick and snare F1 under our evaluation protocol, while additionally providing separated audio stems. The ablation results show that OB gives the most stable transcription gains, whereas TB changes the trade-off between reconstruction, acoustic stem quality, and onset detection. These results suggest that generative drum demixing can serve not only as a source separation model, but also as a practical front end for interpretable drum transcription.

Guitar tablature transcription predicts the string and fret position for each note so that the resulting tablature reproduces the target musical part. Prior sequence-to-sequence approaches have shown promising results on large-scale datasets, but their generalization behavior across different dataset scales remains less explored. In this work, we propose a guitar tablature transcription framework with explicit note-event tokenization and regularized training. The proposed decoder token representation incorporates note-event tokens together with TAB tokens, allowing note boundaries, pitch-related events, and string-fret positions to be represented more explicitly. We evaluate the proposed framework on DadaGP, a large-scale dataset, and Francois Leduc, a small-scale dataset. Our method improves tablature accuracy over the Fretting Transformer baseline on DadaGP, with especially strong gains when trained directly on the small-scale Leduc dataset. We further introduce a pitch-validity constrained decoding strategy that masks pitch-invalid TAB candidates during generation rather than correcting them after decoding and simultaneously preserves the original timing and note structure from the input. This constraint improves tablature accuracy and provides a controlled setting for measuring how much error remains after pitch-invalid predictions are removed. Our code will be released at:https://github.com/MusicGuitarTab/GuitarTab

We present MulTTiPop, a dataset of pop music segments and their associated multitrack MIDI recordings for the evaluation of automatic music transcription models. MulTTiPop contains 572 segments of popular music totaling 3.5 hours of audio, and contains songs from diverse genres and decades from the 1930s to 2000s. To collect this dataset, we perform metadata-based matching on song segments from the Lakh MIDI and TheoryTab datasets, manually identify an anchor beat between the audio and MIDI, then use beat tracking on the audio and warp the MIDI to match its tempo and timing. We evaluate state-of-the-art automatic music transcription models on MulTTiPop and find substantial room for improvement, with the best model achieving 38% Onset F1. More details and sound examples of MulTTiPop are available at https://gclef-cmu.org/multtipop.

Existing methods for automatic music transcription are often limited to single-instrument recordings or fail on complex, real music mixes. Although previous work utilizes synthetic training data, the resulting models generalize poorly, leading to largely unusable transcription output in realistic, multi-instrument settings. In this work, we analyze the effectiveness of synthetic data for pre-training while combining it with fine-tuning on real music audio and post-training using reinforcement learning. We further introduce conditioning on instrument presence to customize transcriptions. Finally, we release MuScriptor, an open-weight multi-instrument music transcription model that works on real-world music recordings from across a diverse range of musical genres.

We propose a novel pipeline, Legato 2, for extracting symbolic notation and semantic knowledge from images of sheet music. Legato 2 features the first large-scale neural model for optical music recognition (OMR) to operate sequentially on a system-by-system basis, following the horizontal lines of notation as they are read on the page, rather than treating the page as an undifferentiated image, enabling better scaling to arbitrarily long inputs. It is also the first OMR model capable of generating symbolic transcriptions that include embedded textual content, such as titles and annotations. The pipeline combines system-level segmentation with an autoregressive vision-LM to capture both local notation details and score structure. Across multiple datasets, Legato 2 consistently outperforms prior state of the art. We also show that symbolic transcriptions complement visual inputs for frontier language models, improving their interpretation of dense musical documents. Legato 2 establishes new state-of-the-art performance in both OMR and downstream sheet music understanding.

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) models have achieved a high level of success in polyphonic transcription of various instruments. Velocity, typically a measure of note intensity, is less commonly predicted in these models due to the absence of velocity labels in available datasets and lack of a proper definition for instruments other than piano. We present a methodology and model for velocity prediction in Automatic Guitar Transcription (AGT) which uses virtual instruments to generate synthetic training data with velocity labels. We first pretrain a model on this synthetic data. These weights are then transferred to a different model and trained on real guitar audio, allowing the model to retain the working velocity prediction while also achieving high performance and generalisability from the real training data. The velocity prediction is shown to outperform a baseline model which does not use the pretrained velocity weights, when evaluated on synthetic data. In addition, using the pretrained velocity weights offers a small improvement in note transcription, though the magnitude of this improvement is limited and not always significant depending on the testing data. Overall the model achieves results comparable to the state of the art in guitar transcription, while also successfully predicting velocity.

Understanding the digital world on mobile devices is shifting from static UI perception to dynamic action comprehension. This capability enables models to convert visual state transitions into operational knowledge, defined as short natural-language sentences that describe action types, target UI elements, textual arguments, and execution orders. However, due to the highly diverse and heterogeneous UI designs across applications, existing vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to accurately infer these underlying operations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Teach VLM, a core model designed to translate mobile screen trajectories into step-wise operational knowledge by extracting and analyzing operation-related keyframes from demonstration videos. To address the scarcity of aligned training data, we develop a systematic data flywheel for scalable data acquisition. We further introduce a novel Chinese Mobile Screen Teach Benchmark for fine-grained evaluation. Building upon Teach VLM, we propose the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm, where the generated operational knowledge serves as an interpretable procedural reference to guide downstream screen-based execution agents. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Teach VLM significantly outperforms strong VLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance in operation semantics prediction. Furthermore, experiments in Android World show that our paradigm yields consistent Task Success Rate improvements for downstream agents. Together, Teach VLM and the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm offer a practical pathway from raw demonstrations to reusable task automation.

Precise note-level annotations are critical for training automatic music transcription (AMT) systems, in particular note-onset labels, which form a core component of many recent AMT systems. However, high-quality annotations for real-world recordings are scarce. Sequence-level score--audio alignment methods such as dynamic time warping provide only coarse correspondence, making a local refinement step necessary. This refinement step, known as snapping, adjusts aligned score onsets using peaks in a neural onset posteriorgram and often determines whether weakly aligned score--audio pairs become usable training data at all. Despite its practical importance, snapping is typically treated as a simple post-processing heuristic and implemented with greedy local decisions. We present a systematic analysis of snapping strategies for training instrument-agnostic transcribers, demonstrating that snapping is essential for learning from weakly aligned data. Building on this, we formulate snapping as a per-pitch assignment problem and solve it via bipartite graph matching, yielding context-aware onset decisions under overlapping refinement windows and uncertain initial alignments. Extensive cross-dataset experiments across piano, chamber, and orchestral recordings show improved onset alignment and transcription accuracy over greedy snapping, with gains increasing for wider snapping windows and coarser initial alignments. Qualitative examples are provided on our project page: https://abhirupsaha8.github.io

Symbolic music evaluation for large language models remains fragmented across representations, datasets, and metrics. We introduce LilyBench, a LilyPond-based benchmark that jointly evaluates symbolic music generation and music understanding on the same family of open-weight LLMs. The benchmark includes a 200-prompt generation suite and ten understanding tasks adapted from ABC-Eval, covering syntax, metadata prediction, structural sequencing, and music recognition. Generation quality is evaluated using compile rate, MusPy descriptor distributions via Jensen-Shannon similarity, and LilyBERT-based Fréchet Music Distance (FMD). Experiments on four open-weight models show that executable LilyPond generation is achievable in zero-shot settings, while structural understanding tasks remain challenging despite strong performance on composer and genre recognition. Our experiments also reveal systematic disagreements between descriptor-based and embedding-based metrics, suggesting that symbolic music evaluation benefits from metric triangulation rather than single-score ranking. We release the benchmark, prompt bank, and evaluation code to support future research in symbolic music generation and understanding at https://github.com/CSCPadova/lilybench

We consider the conversion of musical recordings into human-readable sheet music annotated with timestamps. Such output lets a listener clearly visualize rubato (temporally expressive playing), a learner diagnose ensemble precision and timing choices against the written music, and a musicology scholar compare performance styles across recordings of the same work. We introduce (1) a prompt-conditioned encoder-decoder model, named Rubato, trained to output (2) a new textual representation for polyphonic music, named InterMo, which we designed for compatibility with sequence-to-sequence training. Our experiments demonstrate that Rubato produces timestamped piano sheet music from audio with higher notational accuracy than the best existing approaches, which are based on cascades. We find that even if the cascade is given ground-truth MIDI instead of audio, Rubato performs better, suggesting that the ceiling of existing approaches is primarily representational, not acoustic. Further, because Rubato is trained on several related tasks (with prompts), it competes with or outperforms the best single-task systems on related but simpler tasks like MIDI note grounding and beat/downbeat detection. A demo is available at https://nctamer.github.io/rubato-transcription .

Competitive music transcription models require large amounts of paired audio-score data, which is scarce due to collection costs, alignment difficulty, and copyright restrictions. Meanwhile, vast quantities of unpaired audio recordings and symbolic scores are freely available but have gone unused. We adopt a cycle-consistent translation framework in which a small amount of paired data acts as a minimal anchor, unlocking the full potential of the unpaired pool. We find that: unpaired data yields surprisingly large gains, especially under limited supervision; unpaired audio contributes more than unpaired scores; incorporating unlabeled audio from a new instrument during training improves transcription for that instrument without any paired supervision. Together, these results suggest that scaling unpaired data offers a practical path toward high-quality transcription for instruments where labeled data remains scarce.

A large amount of musical heritage has been digitised by memory institutions: libraries, museums, and archives. Nevertheless, the field of Optical Music Recognition (OMR) has struggled with making this music machine-readable, despite advances in deep learning, mostly because no datasets for training systems in realistic conditions were available. The MusiCorpus dataset aims to remedy this situation by providing 1,309 pages of historical sheet music, primarily handwritten, with MusicXML transcriptions and symbol annotations. It is the largest dataset of handwritten music to date and the first dataset containing a realistic and representative sample of musical document collections from memory institutions, suitable for training and evaluating both end-to-end and object detection-based OMR systems and comparing their performance.

This paper describes a novel paradigm that formalizes automatic piano transcription (APT) as an optimal transport (OT) problem, not as a frame-level multi-label binary classification problem. Our method learns to minimize the cost of transporting a predicted distribution of note events to the ground-truth distribution over time and frequency. The OT loss can thus accommodate temporal misalignment, leading to perceptually relevant optimization. We also propose a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) with a harmonics-aware attention mechanism to capture the spectro-temporal dependencies inherent in music.Our experiments using the MAESTRO dataset showed that our method attained a state-of-the-art performance in onset detection. We confirmed the versatility of the OT loss in application to existing models.

Optical Music Recognition (OMR), the task of transcribing sheet music into a structured textual representation, is currently bottlenecked by a lack of large-scale, annotated datasets of real scans. This forces models to rely on either few-shot transfer or synthetic training pipelines that remain overly simplistic. A secondary challenge is encoding non-uniqueness: in the popular Humdrum **kern format for transcribing music, multiple different text encodings can render into the same visual sheet music. This one-to-many mapping creates a harder learning task and introduces high uncertainty during decoding. We propose Transcoda, an OMR system built on (i) an advanced synthetic data generation pipeline, (ii) a normalization of the **kern encoding to enforce a unique normal form and (iii) grammar-based decoding to ensure the syntactic correctness of the output. This approach allows us to train a compact 59M-parameter model in just 6 hours on a single GPU that outperforms billion-parameter baselines. Transcoda achieves the best score among state of the art baselines on a newly curated benchmark of synthetically rendered scores at 18.46% OMR-NED (compared to 43.91% for the next-best system, Legato) and reduces the error rate on historical Polish scans to 63.97% OMR-NED (down from 80.16% for SMT++).

Rhythm transcription is a key subtask of notation-level Automatic Music Transcription (AMT). While deep learning models have been extensively used for detecting the metrical grid in audio and MIDI performances, beat-based rhythm quantization remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce a novel deep learning approach for quantizing MIDI performances using a priori beat information. Our method leverages the transformer architecture to effectively process synchronized score and performance data for training a quantization model. Key components of our approach include dataset preparation, a beat-based pre-quantization method to align performance and score times within a unified framework, and a MIDI tokenizer tailored for this task. We adapt a transformer model based on the T5 architecture to meet the specific requirements of rhythm quantization. The model is evaluated using a set of score-level metrics designed for objective assessment of quantization performance. Through systematic evaluation, we optimize both data representation and model architecture. Additionally, we apply performance and score augmentations, such as transposition, note deletion, and performance-side time jitter, to enhance the model's robustness. Finally, a qualitative analysis compares our model's quantization performance against state-of-the-art probabilistic and deep-learning models on various example pieces. Our model achieves an onset F1-score of 97.3% and a note value accuracy of 83.3% on the ASAP dataset. It generalizes well across time signatures, including those not seen during training, and produces readable score output. Fine-tuning on instrument-specific datasets further improves performance by capturing characteristic rhythmic and melodic patterns. This work contributes a robust and flexible framework for beat-based MIDI quantization using transformer models.

We propose Legato, a new end-to-end model for optical music recognition (OMR), a task of converting music score images to machine-readable documents. Legato is the first large-scale pretrained OMR model capable of recognizing full-page or multi-page typeset music scores and the first to generate documents in ABC notation, a concise, human-readable format for symbolic music. Bringing together a pretrained vision encoder with an ABC decoder trained on a dataset of more than 214K images, our model exhibits the strong ability to generalize across various typeset scores. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a range of datasets and metrics and demonstrate that Legato outperforms the previous state of the art. On our most realistic dataset, we see a 68.2% and 48.1% absolute error reduction on the standard metrics TEDn and OMR-NED, respectively.

There have been several studies on automatically generating piano covers, and recent advancements in deep learning have enabled the creation of more sophisticated covers. However, existing automatic piano cover models still have room for improvement in terms of expressiveness and fidelity to the original. To address these issues, we propose a learning algorithm called AMT-APC, which leverages the capabilities of automatic music transcription models. By utilizing the strengths of well-established automatic music transcription models, we aim to improve the accuracy of piano cover generation. Our experiments demonstrate that the AMT-APC model reproduces original tracks more accurately than any existing models.