Unified Semantic Representation of Music Scores, Lyrics, and Singing Voices for Multimodal Artificial Intelligence

Authors

  • Gohan Gandhi Department of Computer Science, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA. Author
  • Arjun M. Srivastava Department of Computer Science, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA. Author

Keywords:

unified semantic representation; multimodal artificial intelligence; music information retrieval; singing voice synthesis; score-lyrics alignment; data governance

Abstract

The computational study of music has long been fragmented across symbolic scores, textual lyrics, and audio recordings of singing voices. This fragmentation limits the capacity of artificial intelligence systems to reason across musical modalities, to align lyrical semantics with melodic structure, and to generate expressive performances from combined symbolic and linguistic intent. This paper examines the problem of constructing unified semantic representations for music scores, lyrics, and singing voices within multimodal artificial intelligence. Rather than proposing a single model, the paper develops a system-level account of the structural trade-offs involved in representing discrete symbolic events, continuous acoustic signals, and natural language under a shared semantic framework. The analysis addresses architectural strategies based on attention mechanisms, self-supervised audio representations, and sequence-to-sequence modeling, and it situates these strategies within data infrastructure, annotation governance, and deployment contexts. Particular attention is given to alignment granularity, temporal hierarchy, modality-specific fidelity, robustness across genres and languages, fairness, sustainability, and policy implications. The paper argues that meaningful progress requires not only technical integration but also careful governance of training corpora, evaluation protocols, and downstream sociotechnical effects. A unified representation should be understood as an evolving infrastructure rather than a static embedding space.

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Published

2026-08-01