  In this paper we present a new approach for the generation of
multi-instrument symbolic music driven by musical emotion. The principal
novelty of our approach centres on conditioning a state-of-the-art transformer
based on continuous-valued valence and arousal labels. In addition, we provide
a new large-scale dataset of symbolic music paired with emotion labels in terms
of valence and arousal. We evaluate our approach in a quantitative manner in
two ways, first by measuring its note prediction accuracy, and second via a
regression task in the valence-arousal plane. Our results demonstrate that our
proposed approaches outperform conditioning using control tokens which is
representative of the current state of the art.
