Text2midi: Generating Symbolic Music from Captions

Demo | Model | Website and Examples | Paper | Dataset

text2midi is the first end-to-end model for generating MIDI files from textual descriptions. By leveraging pretrained large language models and a powerful autoregressive transformer decoder, text2midi allows users to create symbolic music that aligns with detailed textual prompts, including musical attributes like chords, tempo, and style.

🔥 Live demo available on HuggingFace Spaces.

Quickstart Guide

Generate symbolic music from a text prompt:

from transformers import T5Tokenizer
from model.transformer_model import Transformer
from miditok import REMI, TokenizerConfig
from pathlib import Path

device = 'cuda' if torch.cuda.is_available() else 'cpu'
artifact_folder = 'artifacts'

tokenizer_filepath = os.path.join(artifact_folder, "vocab_remi.pkl")
# Load the tokenizer dictionary
with open(tokenizer_filepath, "rb") as f:
    r_tokenizer = pickle.load(f)

# Get the vocab size
vocab_size = len(r_tokenizer)
print("Vocab size: ", vocab_size)
model = Transformer(vocab_size, 768, 8, 5000, 18, 1024, False, 8, device=device)
model.load_state_dict(torch.load('/text2midi/artifacts/pytorch_model_140.bin', map_location=device))
model.eval()
tokenizer = T5Tokenizer.from_pretrained("google/flan-t5-base")

src = "A melodic electronic song with ambient elements, featuring piano, acoustic guitar, alto saxophone, string ensemble, and electric bass. Set in G minor with a 4/4 time signature, it moves at a lively Presto tempo. The composition evokes a blend of relaxation and darkness, with hints of happiness and a meditative quality."
inputs = tokenizer(src, return_tensors='pt', padding=True, truncation=True)
input_ids = nn.utils.rnn.pad_sequence(inputs.input_ids, batch_first=True, padding_value=0)
input_ids = input_ids.to(device)
attention_mask =nn.utils.rnn.pad_sequence(inputs.attention_mask, batch_first=True, padding_value=0) 
attention_mask = attention_mask.to(device)
output = model.generate(input_ids, attention_mask, max_len=2000,temperature = 1.0)
output_list = output[0].tolist()
generated_midi = r_tokenizer.decode(output_list)
generated_midi.dump_midi("output.mid")
post_processing("output.mid", "output.mid")

Installation

git clone https://github.com/AMAAI-Lab/text-2-midi
cd text-2-midi
pip install -r requirements.txt

Datasets

The MidiCaps dataset is a large-scale dataset of 168k MIDI files paired with rich text captions. These captions contain musical attributes such as key, tempo, style, and mood, making it ideal for text-to-MIDI generation tasks.

Results of the Listening Study

Each question is rated on a Likert scale from 1 (very bad) to 7 (very good). The table shows the average ratings per question for each group of participants.

Question	General Audience (MidiCaps)	General Audience (text2midi)	Music Experts (MidiCaps)	Music Experts (text2midi)
Overall matching	5.17	4.12	5.29	4.05
Genre matching	5.22	4.29	5.31	4.29
Mood matching	5.24	4.10	5.44	4.26
Key matching	4.72	4.24	4.63	4.05
Chord matching	4.65	4.23	4.05	4.06
Tempo matching	4.72	4.48	5.15	4.90

Objective Evaluations

Metric	text2midi	MidiCaps	MuseCoco
CR ↑	2.156	3.4326	2.1288
CLAP ↑	0.2204	0.2593	0.2158
TB (%) ↑	34.03	-	21.71
TBT (%) ↑	66.9	-	54.63
CK (%) ↑	15.36	-	13.70
CKD (%) ↑	15.80	-	14.59

Note:
CR = Compression ratio
CLAP = CLAP score
TB = Tempo Bin
TBT = Tempo Bin with Tolerance
CK = Correct Key
CKD = Correct Key with Duplicates
↑ = Higher score is better.

Training

To train text2midi, we recommend using accelerate for multi-GPU support. First, configure accelerate by running:

accelerate config

Then, use the following command to start training:

accelerate launch train.py \
--encoder_model="google/flan-t5-large" \
--decoder_model="configs/transformer_decoder_config.json" \
--dataset_name="amaai-lab/MidiCaps" \
--pretrain_dataset="amaai-lab/SymphonyNet" \
--batch_size=16 \
--learning_rate=1e-4 \
--epochs=40 \

Citation

If you use text2midi in your research, please cite:

@inproceedings{bhandari2025text2midi,
    title={text2midi: Generating Symbolic Music from Captions}, 
    author={Keshav Bhandari and Abhinaba Roy and Kyra Wang and Geeta Puri and Simon Colton and Dorien Herremans},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the 39th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025)},
    year={2025}
}