News

Introduction

The Computer Composition Identification Challenge, initiated by the Conference on Sound and Music Technology (CSMT), is succeeding the CSMT Data Challenge, 2020. This new challenge is dedicated to finding improved music generation models and objective evaluation models for a number of specified music styles.

There will be two roles competing against each other in this challenge: Generator versus Judge. Participants must choose one role and complete the corresponding tasks.


Generators are supposed to develop a system1 that can automatically generate a playable violin phrase with given beginning and ending bars, tempo value, key signature, and time signature.

Judges are supposed to analyse given music phrases and produce a Human Composition Score (HCS) -- the probability of the input being composed by real human composers.

1: A system can consist of more than one objective model or rule sets.

Prizes & Awards

The following participants will win the prizes:

The Best Generator for the participant whose generator system obtains the highest score.

The Best Judge for the participant whose judge system obtains the highest score.

Creativity Award for the participant with the most creative solution, determined by the committee.

Procedure

When the challenge begins, a list of violin composers will be released, where each violin composer has a specific music style.

For generator systems, 200 music phrases should be generated in the style of each composer in the list. The beginning and ending bars will not be specified until the final submission. This means the music phrases generated before the final submission can have arbitrary beginning and ends and should be able to generate with specified beginning and ending bars in the final stage.

For judge systems, participants are required to compute the probability of a given music phrase as the input being generated by generator systems, with the given composer’s name as the context. Throughout the development stage, only the composers’ own compositions (positive samples) are allowed to be used to train the judge system .

Submission

NEW
Deadline Extension Notice

Upon requests from potential participants and in order to provide sufficient time for preliminary submissions in CCIC 2021, the organising committee has decided to extend the deadline of the preliminary round to 15th October 2021 for generators and 22nd October 2021 for judges. To check the updated deadlines for the subsequent steps, please refer to the timeline.

In addition, please notice that the submission requirements for judges have changed after the discussion and consideration of the CCIC Organising Committee:

For judges, preliminary submission is voluntary. Judges can still participate in the final round without any preliminary submission. Any valid submission record before the final submission deadline (6th Nov 2021) will be considered as completing the registration for this challenge. It is strongly recommended that judges participate in the preliminary submission, which will be a warm-up and a preparation for the final submission.

For generators, submissions for both preliminary and final round are still required.


Submission Guide

The submission will be via Microsoft CMT. The preliminary submission entry for generators is now available. Please follow the instructions below and submit your generators.

At this stage, no technical report is required. Participants who chose generators should upload a zip file named generator_output_preliminary.zip that contains 8 folders: composer1 - composer8. Each folder should have 200 MIDI files (100.mid - 200.mid), which are the output of your generator model.





Preliminary Submission

The preliminary result contains two submission deadlines. The first deadline is for generators to submit 200 music phrases for each composer. The second deadline is set around one week later to judges for submitting the HCS results, which are the feedback for the music phrases generated by generators .

For generators, participants are required to complete both the preliminary submission and final submission. Any valid submission record in the preliminary submissions will be considered as completing the registration for this challenge but the submitted content will not affect the final score.

For judges, preliminary submission is voluntary. Participants can still participate in the final round (6th Nov 2021) without any preliminary submission. Any valid submission record before the final submission deadline will be considered as completing the registration for this challenge. It is strongly recommended that judges participate in the preliminary round, which will be a warm-up and a preparation for the final submission.



Final Submission

The last few days before the final submission deadline will be the evaluation stage, when 200 pairs of beginnings and endings will be released for each composer's pieces in the list.

In 48 hours, generator systems should complete these music phrases and submit them as their final submission. Then, these phrases will be compiled together and made available to judge systems. From this moment on, in the next 48 hours, judge systems are expected to calculate the HCSs for these phrases and make the final submission. For each composer, a certain number of extra phrases extracted from human-composed pieces will be mixed into the input.

Generator scores are measured by are the average HCS from all judges.

Judge performances are ranked by the sum of the following two scores:

  1. HCS for human composed phrases.
  2. 1-HCS for phrases generated by generators.

For detailed requirements, please refer to Submission Requirements .

Schedule

15th Oct

Preliminary submission deadline for generators

22nd Oct

Preliminary submission deadline for judges (Voluntary)

1st Nov

Release of the beginnings and endings

3rd Nov

Final submission deadline for generators

4th Nov

Release of the generated phrases

6th Nov

Final submission deadline for judges

Mid-Nov

Result announcement

Subject to changes due to uncertainty of COVID-19

organisation committee

Zhang Ru

Professor, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

George Fazekas

Senior Lecturer, Queen Mary University of London

Li Zijin

Associate Professor, Central Conservatory of Music

Zhu Yidan

Secretary General, Beijing Acoustics Society

Zhou Wei

Founding Partner of Beijing Zhongwen Law Firm

Li Shengchen

Assistant Professor, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

FAQ

For any enquires, contact us:
Yuqiang Li and Xuening Wang , Challenge Coordinators, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University,

csmt.ccic.2021@gmail.com