  Modelling the real world complexity of music is a challenge for machine
learning. We address the task of modeling melodic sequences from the same music
genre. We perform a comparative analysis of two probabilistic models; a
Dirichlet Variable Length Markov Model (Dirichlet-VMM) and a Time Convolutional
Restricted Boltzmann Machine (TC-RBM). We show that the TC-RBM learns
descriptive music features, such as underlying chords and typical melody
transitions and dynamics. We assess the models for future prediction and
compare their performance to a VMM, which is the current state of the art in
melody generation. We show that both models perform significantly better than
the VMM, with the Dirichlet-VMM marginally outperforming the TC-RBM. Finally,
we evaluate the short order statistics of the models, using the
Kullback-Leibler divergence between test sequences and model samples, and show
that our proposed methods match the statistics of the music genre significantly
better than the VMM.
