  We introduce a project that revives a piece of 15th-century Korean court
music, Chihwapyeong and Chwipunghyeong, composed upon the poem Songs of the
Dragon Flying to Heaven. One of the earliest examples of Jeongganbo, a Korean
musical notation system, the remaining version only consists of a rudimentary
melody. Our research team, commissioned by the National Gugak (Korean
Traditional Music) Center, aimed to transform this old melody into a
performable arrangement for a six-part ensemble. Using Jeongganbo data acquired
through bespoke optical music recognition, we trained a BERT-like masked
language model and an encoder-decoder transformer model. We also propose an
encoding scheme that strictly follows the structure of Jeongganbo and denotes
note durations as positions. The resulting machine-transformed version of
Chihwapyeong and Chwipunghyeong were evaluated by experts and performed by the
Court Music Orchestra of National Gugak Center. Our work demonstrates that
generative models can successfully be applied to traditional music with limited
training data if combined with careful design.
