Pianoroll-Event: A Novel Score Representation for Symbolic Music
Published in ICASSP, 2026
Overview of the Pianoroll-Event encoding pipeline: from pianoroll to compressed event sequence.
Abstract
We introduce an encoding scheme that merges pianoroll representations with event-based descriptions. Our approach defines four event types:
| Event Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Frame Events | Capture temporal structure of musical segments |
| Gap Events | Handle silence and rests between notes |
| Pattern Events | Encode repetitive musical patterns efficiently |
| Structure Events | Represent high-level musical form |
This scheme achieves 1.36x to 7.16x encoding efficiency compared to comparable discrete sequence approaches. Testing across multiple autoregressive models demonstrates consistent performance gains in both objective metrics and human evaluation.