Abstract:

We introduce a project that revives a piece of 15th-century Korean court music, Chwipunghyeong, composed upon the poem 'Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven'. One of the earliest examples of Jeongganbo, a Korean musical notation system, the remaining version only consists of a rudimentary melody. Our research team, commissioned by the National Gugak (Korean Traditional Music) Center, aimed to transform this old melody into a performable arrangement for a six-part ensemble. Using Jeongganbo data acquired through bespoke optical music recognition, we trained a BERT-like masked language model and an encoder-decoder transformer model. We also propose an encoding scheme that strictly follows the structure of Jeongganbo and denotes note durations as positions. The resulting machine-transformed version of Chwipunghyeong was evaluated by experts and is scheduled to be performed by the Court Music Orchestra of National Gugak Center. Our work demonstrates that generative models can successfully be applied to traditional music with limited training data if combined with careful design.

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