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Algorithmic Composition
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (2018) 42 (1): 60–79.
Published: 01 April 2018
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Milton Babbitt is noted for composing twelve-tone and serial music that is both complex and highly constrained. He has written extensively on a variety of topics in music and his writings have had a profound and lasting impact on musical composition. In this article, we first review in detail his compositional process and the techniques he developed, focusing in particular on the all-partition array, time-point system, and equal-note-value strings used in his later works. Next, we describe our proposed procedure for automating his compositional process using these techniques. We conclude by using our procedure to automatically generate an entirely new musical work that we argue is in the style of Babbitt.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (2017) 41 (4): 45–63.
Published: 01 December 2017
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We present and discuss the Agent Designer, a system that enables users of digital audio workstations to generate novel high-level structures for their compositions based on previous examples. The system uses variable-order Markov models and rule induction to learn both temporal relations and structural relations between parts in a piece of music. As is usual in machine learning, however, the quality of the learning can be improved greatly by users specifying relevant features. The Agent Designer therefore points to important design and human–computer interaction problems, as well as algorithmic challenges. We present a number of studies that help to understand how effective the Agent Designer is and how we might design a user interface that best enables users to obtain quality results from the system. We show that the Agent Designer is effective for certain musical styles, such as loop-based electronic music, and that we as expert users can design agents that produce the most effective results. We also note that it remains a challenge to automate this process fully.
Includes: Multimedia, Supplementary data
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (2016) 40 (3): 41–57.
Published: 01 September 2016
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Algorithmic composition methods must prove themselves within real-world musical contexts to more firmly solidify their adoption in musical practice. The present project is an automatic composing program trained on a corpus of songs from musical theater to create novel material, directly generating a scored lead sheet of vocal melody and chords. The program can also produce output based upon phonetic analysis of user-provided lyrics. The chance to undertake the research arose from a television documentary funded by Sky Arts that considered the question of whether current-generation, computationally creative methods could devise a new work of musical theater (the research described here provides but one strand within that project). Allied with the documentary, the resultant musical had a two-week West End run in London and was itself broadcast in full. Evaluation of the project included both design feedback from a musical theater composer team, and critical feedback from audiences and media coverage. The research challenges of the real-world context are discussed, with respect to the compromises necessary to get such a project to the stage.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (2015) 39 (1): 11–26.
Published: 01 March 2015
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This article presents a series of algorithmic techniques for melody generation, inspired by models of music cognition. The techniques are designed for interactive composition, and so privilege brevity, simplicity, and flexibility over fidelity to the underlying models. The cognitive models canvassed span gestalt, preference rule, and statistical learning perspectives; this is a diverse collection with a common thread—the centrality of “expectations” to music cognition. We operationalize some recurrent themes across this collection as probabilistic descriptions of melodic tendency, codifying them as stochastic melody-generation techniques. The techniques are combined into a concise melody generator, with salient parameters exposed for ready manipulation in real time. These techniques may be especially relevant to algorithmic composers, the live-coding community, and to music psychologists and theorists interested in how computational interpretations of cognitive models “sound” in practice.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (2014) 38 (4): 80–99.
Published: 01 December 2014
Abstract
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Many tools for computer-assisted composition contain built-in music-theoretical assumptions that may constrain the output to particular styles. In contrast, this article presents a new musical representation that contains almost no built-in knowledge, but that allows even musically untrained users to generate polyphonic textures that are derived from the user's own initial compositions. This representation, called functional scaffolding for musical composition (FSMC), exploits a simple yet powerful property of multipart compositions: The pattern of notes and rhythms in different instrumental parts of the same song are functionally related. That is, in principle, one part can be expressed as a function of another. Music in FSMC is represented accordingly as a functional relationship between an existing human composition, or scaffold, and a generated set of one or more additional musical voices. A human user without any musical expertise can then explore how the generated voice (or voices) should relate to the scaffold through an interactive evolutionary process akin to animal breeding. By inheriting from the intrinsic style and texture of the piece provided by the user, this approach can generate additional voices for potentially any style of music without the need for extensive musical expertise.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (2012) 36 (3): 8–23.
Published: 01 September 2012
Abstract
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This article presents Autocousmatic, an algorithmic system that creates electroacoustic art music using machine-listening processes within the design cycle. After surveying previous projects in automated mixing and algorithmic composition, the design and implementation of the current system is outlined. An iterative, automatic effects processing system is coupled to machine-listening components, including the assessment of the “worthiness” of intermediate files to continue to a final mixing stage. Generation of the formal structure of output pieces utilizes models derived from a small corpus of exemplar electroacoustic music, and a dynamic time-warping similarity-measure technique drawn from music information retrieval is employed to decide between candidate final mixes. Evaluation of Autocousmatic has involved three main components: the entry of its output works into composition competitions, the public release of the software with an associated questionnaire and sound examples on SoundCloud, and direct feedback from three highly experienced electroacoustic composers. The article concludes with a discussion of the current status of the system, with regards to ideas from the computational creativity literature, among other sources, and suggestions for future work that may advance the compositional ability of the system beyond its current level and towards human-like expertise.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (2011) 35 (4): 64–82.
Published: 01 December 2011
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (2011) 35 (3): 40–56.
Published: 01 September 2011
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (2010) 34 (3): 56–66.
Published: 01 September 2010
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (2009) 33 (4): 56–68.
Published: 01 December 2009
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (2009) 33 (3): 45–60.
Published: 01 September 2009
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Computer Music Journal (1999) 23 (4): 59–73.
Published: 01 December 1999