A Piano Ballad Arrangement System

This paper presents a system for generating ballad-style arrangements for piano scores of popular music. While other systems for automatically generating piano arrangements exist, most of them have aimed at reproducing the original arrangement as well as possible on the piano only and do not attempt at an arrangement in a style different from the original. Given a new version of a popular song, our technique converts it into a ballad based on the several "ballad arrangement rules" (BAR). We analyzed 100 ballad arrangements from commercial piano books, and designed broken chords and note reduction rules based on BAR. Experimental results demonstrate that our system can enhance ballad-likeness.