Hookpad Aria: A Copilot for Songwriters
Chris Donahue (CMU)*, Shih-Lun Wu (Carnegie Mellon University), Yewon Kim (KAIST), Dave Carlton (Hooktheory), Ryan Miyakawa (Hooktheory), John Thickstun (University of Washington)
This paper will be presented in person
We present Hookpad Aria, a generative AI system designed to assist musicians in writing Western pop songs. Our system is seamlessly integrated into Hookpad, a web-based editor designed for the composition of lead sheets - symbolic music scores that describe melody and harmony. Hookpad Aria has numerous generation capabilities designed to assist users in non-sequential composition workflows, including: (1) generating left-to-right continuations of existing material, (2) filling in missing spans in the middle of existing material, and (3) generating harmony from melody and vice versa. Hookpad Aria is also a scalable data flywheel for music co-creation—since its release in March 2024, Aria has generated 318k suggestions for 3k users who have accepted 74k into their songs.