Melody Extraction and Encoding Method for Generating Healthcare Music Automatically

The strong relationship between music and health has helped prove that soft and peaceful classical music can significantly reduce people’s stress; however, it is difficult to identify and collect examples of such music to build a library. Therefore, a system is required that can automatically generate similar classical music selections from a small amount of input music. Melody is the main element that reflects the rhythms and emotions of musical works; therefore, most automatic music generation research is based on melody. Given that melody varies frequently within musical bars, the latter are used as the basic units of composition. As such, there is a requirement for melody extraction techniques and bar-based encoding methods for automatic generation of bar-based music using melodies. This paper proposes a method that handles melody track extraction and bar encoding. First, the melody track is extracted using a pitch-based term frequency–inverse document frequency (TFIDF) algorithm and a feature-based filter. Subsequently, four specific features of the notes within a bar are encoded into a fixed-size matrix during bar encoding. We conduct experiments to determine the accuracy of track extraction based on verification data obtained with the TFIDF algorithm and the filter; an accuracy of 94.7% was calculated based on whether the extracted track was a melody track. The estimated value demonstrates that the proposed method can accurately extract melody tracks. This paper discusses methods for automatically extracting melody tracks from MIDI files and encoding based on bars. The possibility of generating music through deep learning neural networks is facilitated by the methods we examine within this work. To help the neural networks generate higher quality music, which is good for human health, the data preprocessing methods contained herein should be improved in future works.