Anton — A Rule-Based Composition System

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Automatic Music Composition using Answer Set Programming

Music composition used to be a pen and paper activity. These these days music is often composed with the aid of computer software, even to the point where the computer compose parts of the score autonomously. The composition of most styles of music is governed by rules. We show that by approaching the automation, analysis and verification of composition as a knowledge representation task and formalising these rules in a suitable logical language, powerful and expressive intelligent composition tools can be easily built. This application paper describes the use of answer set programming to construct an automated system, named ANTON, that can compose melodic, harmonic and rhythmic music, diagnose errors in human compositions and serve as a computer-aided composition tool. The combination of harmonic, rhythmic and melodic composition in a single framework makes ANTON unique in the growing area of algorithmic composition. With near real-time composition, ANTON reaches the point where it can not only be used as a component in an interactive composition tool but also has the potential for live performances and concerts or automatically generated background music in a variety of applications. With the use of a fully declarative language and an "off-the-shelf" reasoning engine, ANTON provides the human composer a tool which is significantly simpler, more compact and more versatile than other existing systems. This paper has been accepted for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).Comment: 31 pages, 10 figures. Extended version of our ICLP2008 paper. Formatted following TPLP guideline

Audio-tactile stimuli to improve health and well-being : a preliminary position paper

From literature and through common experience it is known that stimulation of the tactile (touch) sense or auditory (hearing) sense can be used to improve people's health and well-being. For example, to make people relax, feel better, sleep better or feel comforted. In this position paper we propose the concept of combined auditory-tactile stimulation and argue that it potentially has positive effects on human health and well-being through influencing a user's body and mental state. Such effects have, to date, not yet been fully explored in scientific research. The current relevant state of the art is briefly addressed and its limitations are indicated. Based on this, a vision is presented of how auditory-tactile stimulation could be used in healthcare and various other application domains. Three interesting research challenges in this field are identified: 1) identifying relevant mechanisms of human perception of combined auditory-tactile stimuli; 2) finding methods for automatic conversions between audio and tactile content; 3) using measurement and analysis of human bio-signals and behavior to adapt the stimulation in an optimal way to the user. Ideas and possible routes to address these challenges are presented

Quillen homology for operads via Gr\"obner bases

The main goal of this paper is to present a way to compute Quillen homology of operads. The key idea is to use the notion of a shuffle operad we introduced earlier; this allows to compute, for a symmetric operad, the homology classes and the shape of the differential in its minimal model, although does not give an insight on the symmetric groups action on the homology. Our approach goes in several steps. First, we regard our symmetric operad as a shuffle operad, which allows to compute its Gr\"obner basis. Next, we define a combinatorial resolution for the "monomial replacement" of each shuffle operad (provided by the Gr\"obner bases theory). Finally, we explain how to "deform" the differential to handle every operad with a Gr\"obner basis, and find explicit representatives of Quillen homology classes for a large class of operads. We also present various applications, including a new proof of Hoffbeck's PBW criterion, a proof of Koszulness for a class of operads coming from commutative algebras, and a homology computation for the operads of Batalin-Vilkovisky algebras and of Rota-Baxter algebras.Comment: 41 pages, this paper supersedes our previous preprint arXiv:0912.4895. Final version, to appear in Documenta Mat