  Music that is generated by recurrent neural networks often lacks a sense of
direction and coherence. We therefore propose a two-stage LSTM-based model for
lead sheet generation, in which the harmonic and rhythmic templates of the song
are produced first, after which, in a second stage, a sequence of melody notes
is generated conditioned on these templates. A subjective listening test shows
that our approach outperforms the baselines and increases perceived musical
coherence.
