Benzaiten: A Non-expert-friendly Event of Automatic Melody Generation Contest

This paper presents a contest-style music evaluation event called Benzaiten. There have been some attempts to evaluate different music generation systems with a unified criterion and/or platform, but it was not en event that non-experts can easily enjoy. At Benzaiten, we encouraged non-researcher people to join it as entrants by providing starter kits and communication channels. As well, we exercised ideas towards a high-quality entertainment event in order for laypeople to enjoy it. As a result, 15 people joined this event as entrants (eight of which moved to the final round) and more than 100 people participated as the audience.