Graph Neural Network Guided Music Mashup Generation

Music mashups integrate elements from different songs to create surprising and engaging listening experiences. Typically, a mashup combines the vocal track of a base song with the instrumental tracks of complementary songs. Automating the production of mashups has been an area of research for decades. Traditional approaches utilize rule-based methods, such as matching tempo and harmonic similarity, to select optimal segments for mashup generation. More recent techniques leverage neural networks to classify segment compatibility. However, both approaches primarily focus on layering segments that are generally compatible, without ensuring their detailed integration and alignment with the vocal track. In contrast, we introduce a novel approach using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that learns to rearrange instrumental segments to better align with the base vocal track, resulting in more surprising and accurate music blends for mashup generation. Additionally, we conducted subjective listening tests to evaluate our generated mashups against a baseline model using the same song pairs and the original base songs, assessing our model’s performance. Generated mashups used for evaluation can be found in https://anonymousmus.github.io/bnr.github.io/.