The use of recurrent neural networks for modeling and generating music has been shown to be quite effective for compact, textual transcriptions of traditional music from Ireland and the UK. We explore how well these models perform for textual transcriptions of traditional music from Scandinavia. This type of music has characteristics that are similar to and different from that of Irish music, e.g., mode, rhythm, and structure. We investigate the effects of different architectures and training regimens, and evaluate the resulting models using three methods: a comparison of statistics between real and generated transcriptions, an appraisal of generated transcriptions via a semi-structured interview with an expert in Swedish folk music, and an ex- ercise conducted with students of Scandinavian folk music. We find that some of our models can generate new tran- scriptions sharing characteristics with Scandinavian folk music, but which often lack the simplicity of real transcrip- tions. One of our models has been implemented online at http://www.folkrnn.org for anyone to try.

QC 20210915