2025/06/29 by Talmadge He, He, Tao-Tao, Martin E. Malandro +3
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Diverse Musicological Studies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Music Technology and Sound Studies #Music and Audio Processing #Sound (cs.SD) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.23130
openalex publication_date 2025/06/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Florence B. Price was a composer in the early 20th century whose music reflects her upbringing in the American South, her African heritage, and her Western classical training. She is noted as the first African-American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra. Her music has recently received renewed attention from both the public and the research community, decades after her death. In addition to other genres, Price was a prolific composer for solo voice and piano. Music historians have documented the existence of 134 art songs and piano/voice arrangements for spirituals and folk songs written by Price. We release a digital catalog of 112 of these works in MuseScore, MusicXML, MIDI, and PDF format. We also use this dataset to fine-tune a symbolic music generation model to generate accompaniments to melodies, and we conduct a blind listening experiment that shows that accompaniments generated by our model are perceived as being reflective of Florence Price's style more frequently than accompaniments generated by a baseline model. We release our model as the Florence Price Piano Accompaniment Generator alongside our dataset.