F-StrIPE: Fast Structure-Informed Positional Encoding for Symbolic Music Generation

Abstract: While music remains a challenging domain for generative models like Transformers, recent progress has been made by exploiting suitable musically-informed priors. One technique to leverage information about musical structure in Transformers is inserting such knowledge into the positional encoding (PE) module. However, Transformers carry a quadratic cost in sequence length. In this paper, we propose F-StrIPE, a structure-informed PE scheme that works in linear complexity. Using existing kernel approximation techniques based on random features, we show that F-StrIPE is a generalization of Stochastic Positional Encoding (SPE). We illustrate the empirical merits of F-StrIPE using melody harmonization for symbolic music.