Hookpad Aria: A Copilot for Songwriters
Abstract
We present Hookpad Aria, a generative AI system designed to assist musicians in writing Western pop songs. Our system is seamlessly integrated into Hookpad, a web-based editor designed for the composition of lead sheets: symbolic music scores that describe melody and harmony. Hookpad Aria has numerous generation capabilities designed to assist users in non-sequential composition workflows, including: (1) generating left-to-right continuations of existing material, (2) filling in missing spans in the middle of existing material, and (3) generating harmony from melody and vice versa. Hookpad Aria is also a scalable data flywheel for music co-creation -- since its release in March 2024, Aria has generated 318k suggestions for 3k users who have accepted 74k into their songs. More information about Hookpad Aria is available at https://www.hooktheory.com/hookpad/aria
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.08122,
title = {Hookpad Aria: A Copilot for Songwriters},
author = {Chris Donahue and Shih-Lun Wu and Yewon Kim and Dave Carlton and Ryan Miyakawa and John Thickstun},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.08122},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Extended abstract presented in the Late-Breaking Demo Session at ISMIR 2024 (ISMIR LBD 2024)