Build Your Own Band (BYOB): Generating instrumental accompaniments for a melody

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led to advancements in multiple fields of research, and music has always been a field of high interest. Music is an important part of life and various studies have shown the link between better living and listening to music. From completing melodies to composing music from scratch, there are many applications of AI in this domain. This paper aims to analyse one such application of using AI for music generation, specifically for instrumental accompaniment. Instrumental accompaniment is essentially the instrumental music that is composed to support or complement a melody. Creating instrumental accompaniment for music generally requires extensive musical knowledge or forming a band together with skilled instrumentalists. Build Your Own Band (BYOB) attempts to simplify this process with the help of AI. In this research work, three transformer models are employed for training various accompanying instruments. Here, the proposed transformer model accepts a melody line as input and produces an accompanying track with instruments like bass instruments, the guitar and string instruments. One of the main challenges was to make sure that these instruments produce a cohesive sound.