Difficulty-Aware Score Generation for Piano Sight-Reading

Abstract: Adapting learning materials to the level of skill of a student is important in education. In the context of music training, one essential ability is sight-reading -- playing unfamiliar scores at first sight -- which benefits from progressive and level-appropriate practice. However, creating exercises at the appropriate level of difficulty demands significant time and effort. We address this challenge as a controlled symbolic music generation task that aims to produce piano scores with a desired difficulty level. Controlling symbolic generation through conditioning is commonly done using control tokens, but these do not always have a clear impact on global properties, such as difficulty. To improve conditioning, we introduce an auxiliary optimization target for difficulty prediction that helps prevent conditioning collapse -- a common issue in which models ignore control signals in the absence of explicit supervision. This auxiliary objective helps the model to learn internal representations aligned with the target difficulty, enabling more precise and adaptive score generation. Evaluation with automatic metrics and expert judgments shows better control of difficulty and potential educational value. Our approach represents a step toward personalized music education through the generation of difficulty-aware practice material.