A Traditional Approach to Symbolic Piano Continuation

Abstract: We present a traditional approach to symbolic piano music continuation for the MIREX 2025 Symbolic Music Generation challenge. While computational music generation has recently focused on developing large foundation models with sophisticated architectural modifications, we argue that simpler approaches remain more effective for constrained, single-instrument tasks. We thus return to a simple, unaugmented next-token-prediction objective on tokenized raw MIDI, aiming to outperform large foundation models by using better data and better fundamentals. We release model weights and code at https://github.com/christianazinn/mirex2025.