Listen and Chant Before You Read: The Ladder of Beauty in LM Pre-Training
We show that pre-training a Transformer on music before language significantly accelerates language acquisition. Using piano performances (MAESTRO dataset), a developmental pipeline -- music $\to$ poetry $\to$ prose -- yields a $17.5\%$ perplexity improvement over random initialization ($p < 0.001$, 5 seeds), with music and poetry improving orthogonal model components (internal computation and embeddings, respectively). Convergence tests confirm that this is not a transient head start: at $d\!=\!64$, multi-seed validation (5 seeds) shows a persistent 5.5\% gap at plateau ($p = 0.017$), with the pipeline converging faster and to a lower loss in every run. Real music matches the transfer ce...
| Authors | Yoshinori Nomura |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 23 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 April 2026 |
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