Six Dragons Fly Again: A Journey of Reviving 15th‑Century Korean Court Music

Despite the expanding research on symbolic music generation, there has been limited application of this to musical repertoires beyond the West. We introduce a project that revives pieces of 15th‑century Korean court music, Chihwapyeong and Chwipunghyeong, composed upon the poem Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven. As one of the earliest examples of Jeongganbo—a Korean musical notation system— the extant version only consists of a rudimentary melody. Our research team was commissioned by the National Gugak Center (NGC) to transform this old melody into a performable arrangement for a six‑part ensemble. Using Jeongganbo data acquired through bespoke optical music‑recognition tools and encoded using our novel approach that strictly follows the structure of Jeongganbo, we trained models for orchestral part generation and melody infilling. The resulting machine‑transformed versions of Chihwapyeong and Chwipunghyeong were evaluated by experts and performed by the Court Music Orchestra of the NGC. Our work demonstrates that generative models can successfully be applied to traditional music with limited training data if combined with careful design. By providing details of the project’s evolution, a machine‑readable dataset of Korean court music, and a library for an interactive web demo, we hope this work will directly support further research on this specific repertoire, and, equally importantly, encourage others considering similar projects on additional musical repertoires.