Drumroll Please: Modeling Multi-Scale Rhythmic Gestures with Flexible Grids

We present a new data representation for music modeling and generation called a Flexible Grid. This representation aims to balance flexibility with structure in order to encode all the musical events (notes or rhythmic onsets) in a dataset without quantizing or discarding any temporal information. In experiments with a dataset of MIDI drum performances, we find that when implemented in a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) model, Flexible Grid representations can enable detailed generation of music performance data that includes multiple different gestures and articulations.