Functional Scaffolding for Musical Composition: A New Approach in Computer-Assisted Music Composition

While it is important for systems intended to enhance musical creativity to define and explore musical ideas conceived by individual users, many limit musical freedom by focusing on maintaining musical structure, thereby impeding the user\u27s freedom to explore his or her individual style. This dissertation presents a comprehensive body of work that introduces a new musical representation that allows users to explore a space of musical rules that are created from their own melodies. 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 an additional generated voice. This relationship is encoded by a type of artificial neural network called a compositional pattern producing network (CPPN). A human user without any musical expertise can then explore how these additional generated voices should relate to the scaffold through an interactive evolutionary process akin to animal breeding. The utility of this insight is validated by two implementations of FSMC called NEAT Drummer and MaestroGenesis, that respectively help users tailor drum patterns and complete multipart arrangements from as little as a single original monophonic track. The five major contributions of this work address the overarching hypothesis in this dissertation that functional relationships alone, rather than specialized music theory, are sufficient for generating plausible additional voices. First, to validate FSMC and determine whether plausible generated voices result from the human-composed scaffold or intrinsic properties of the CPPN, drum patterns are created with NEAT Drummer to accompany several different polyphonic pieces. Extending the FSMC approach to generate pitched voices, the second contribution reinforces the importance of functional transformations through quality assessments that indicate that some partially FSMC-generated pieces are indistinguishable from those that are fully human. While the third contribution focuses on constructing and exploring a space of plausible voices with MaestroGenesis, the fourth presents results from a two-year study where students discuss their creative experience with the program. Finally, the fifth contribution is a plugin for MaestroGenesis called MaestroGenesis Voice (MG-V) that provides users a more natural way to incorporate MaestroGenesis in their creative endeavors by allowing scaffold creation through the human voice. Together, the chapters in this dissertation constitute a comprehensive approach to assisted music generation, enabling creativity without the need for musical expertise

Music Mentor

Extra-curricular learning is on the rise, and many are interested in expanding their current knowledge by utilizing the recent increase in educational technology. While many forms of educational technology exist, there are few interactive and engaging platforms that teach music theory. Apps such as Perfect Ear and MyMusicTheory are great for becoming familiar with reading music and recognizing pitches, however, they often become dry with repetition and repeated tasks. By combining existing technologies that can complete real time conversions from raw audio to MIDI, our goal was to gather information such as harmonies, key and compatible chords from the user’s input. Using this data we aimed to create dynamic lesson plans based on user input, rather than using the same repetitive prompts from overused question pools. We were successfully able to generate these lesson plans, however, the lesson plans that we were able to create are somewhat limited. Given time restraints, we struggled to implement the pruning of audio input to match the desired lesson plans, as the recorded notes must match the correct format to generate a successful plan. Furthermore, we were not able to train a reliable voice model to recognize notes before the project was due. Though not fully complete, we successfully created a prototype dynamic lesson plan that can potentially engage users and assist in the learning of music theory if implemented in future technology

Worldwide Infrastructure for Neuroevolution: A Modular Library to Turn Any Evolutionary Domain into an Online Interactive Platform

Across many scientific disciplines, there has emerged an open opportunity to utilize the scale and reach of the Internet to collect scientific contributions from scientists and non-scientists alike. This process, called citizen science, has already shown great promise in the fields of biology and astronomy. Within the fields of artificial life (ALife) and evolutionary computation (EC) experiments in collaborative interactive evolution (CIE) have demonstrated the ability to collect thousands of experimental contributions from hundreds of users across the glob. However, such collaborative evolutionary systems can take nearly a year to build with a small team of researchers. This dissertation introduces a new developer framework enabling researchers to easily build fully persistent online collaborative experiments around almost any evolutionary domain, thereby reducing the time to create such systems to weeks for a single researcher. To add collaborative functionality to any potential domain, this framework, called Worldwide Infrastructure for Neuroevolution (WIN), exploits an important unifying principle among all evolutionary algorithms: regardless of the overall methods and parameters of the evolutionary experiment, every individual created has an explicit parent-child relationship, wherein one individual is considered the direct descendant of another. This principle alone is enough to capture and preserve the relationships and results for a wide variety of evolutionary experiments, while allowing multiple human users to meaningfully contribute. The WIN framework is first validated through two experimental domains, image evolution and a new two-dimensional virtual creature domain, Indirectly Encoded SodaRace (IESoR), that is shown to produce a visually diverse variety of ambulatory creatures. Finally, an Android application built with WIN, filters, allows users to interactively evolve custom image effects to apply to personalized photographs, thereby introducing the first CIE application available for any mobile device. Together, these collaborative experiments and new mobile application establish a comprehensive new platform for evolutionary computation that can change how researchers design and conduct citizen science online

AI Methods in Algorithmic Composition: A Comprehensive Survey

Algorithmic composition is the partial or total automation of the process of music composition by using computers. Since the 1950s, different computational techniques related to Artificial Intelligence have been used for algorithmic composition, including grammatical representations, probabilistic methods, neural networks, symbolic rule-based systems, constraint programming and evolutionary algorithms. This survey aims to be a comprehensive account of research on algorithmic composition, presenting a thorough view of the field for researchers in Artificial Intelligence.This study was partially supported by a grant for the MELOMICS project (IPT-300000-2010-010) from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, and a grant for the CAUCE project (TSI-090302-2011-8) from the Spanish Ministerio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio. The first author was supported by a grant for the GENEX project (P09-TIC- 5123) from the Consejería de Innovación y Ciencia de Andalucía

Neuroevolution in Games: State of the Art and Open Challenges

This paper surveys research on applying neuroevolution (NE) to games. In neuroevolution, artificial neural networks are trained through evolutionary algorithms, taking inspiration from the way biological brains evolved. We analyse the application of NE in games along five different axes, which are the role NE is chosen to play in a game, the different types of neural networks used, the way these networks are evolved, how the fitness is determined and what type of input the network receives. The article also highlights important open research challenges in the field.Comment: - Added more references - Corrected typos - Added an overview table (Table 1

Conceptual Representations for Computational Concept Creation

Computational creativity seeks to understand computational mechanisms that can be characterized as creative. The creation of new concepts is a central challenge for any creative system. In this article, we outline different approaches to computational concept creation and then review conceptual representations relevant to concept creation, and therefore to computational creativity. The conceptual representations are organized in accordance with two important perspectives on the distinctions between them. One distinction is between symbolic, spatial and connectionist representations. The other is between descriptive and procedural representations. Additionally, conceptual representations used in particular creative domains, such as language, music, image and emotion, are reviewed separately. For every representation reviewed, we cover the inference it affords, the computational means of building it, and its application in concept creation.Peer reviewe

Generating a complete multipart musical composition from a single monophonic melody with functional scaffolding

This paper advances the state of the art for a computer-assisted approach to music generation called functional sca↵olding for musical composition (FSMC), whose representation facilitates creative combination, exploration, and transformation of musical concepts. Music in FSMC is represented as a functional relationship between an existing human composition, or scaffold, and a generated accompaniment. This relationship is encoded by a type of artificial neural network called a compositional pattern producing network (CPPN). A human user without any musical expertise can then explore how accompaniment should relate to the sca↵old through an interactive evolutionary process akin to animal breeding. While the power of such a functional representation has previously been shown to constrain the search to plausible accompaniments, this study goes further by showing that the user can tailor complete multipart arrangements from only a single original monophonic track provided by the user, thus enabling creativity without the need for musical expertise

'Active Agony’ within Wolfgang Rihm’s Tutuguri and the 4th String Quartet

Wolfgang Rihm’s mature output has always betrayed a tangible and formative connection with other forms of artistic expression, to the extent that he effectively speaks of himself as a sculptor of sound. The successive particular influence in the 70s and early 80s of Kurt Kocherscheidt and Arnulf Rainer in the visual arts and Antonin Artaud in dramaturgy have been variously explored, at least in relation to the works from the mid 80s onwards. One work, Tutuguri, has been called a “border crossing point” in his creative development but it perhaps should thought of rather as the place where Rihm engaged in a more overt struggle to make his creative compositional processes more like those of visual artists. Rihm’s subsequent poetics, and the commentary of others, has tended perhaps to obscure the formative nature of his compositional thinking between late 1980 and 1982 during the composition of Tutuguri and the 4th String Quartet, and therefore to overlook his developing responses to other art forms which influenced his writing at that time. In focusing, for example, on Rihm’s “worked out” musical processes of the late 80s and 90s which are directly comparable and analogous to Rainer’s technique of “Overpainting”, earlier “premonitions” in Tutuguri and the 4th Quartet in particular may have been overlooked, in favour of connections with Artaud even though these are not always necessarily obvious in the music. Underpinning this struggle was the tension between the imaginary and the symbolic where the spontaneous imagination found itself at odds with the need to write the music out symbolically, a state which Rihm refers to as the “active agony” caused by the “comprehensive conflict of material and imagination”. This struggle can be illustrated through consideration of some of the tensions inherent in the 4th Quartet which Rihm, writing on the occasion of its first performance in 1983, described as a «late-comer and at the same time a precursor». In Tutuguri these tensions are evident throughout through the collision between the influential art forms of Rainer/Artaud and Rihm’s idea of ‘Musicblocks’, as expressed in his essay Ins eigene Fleisch. The resulting musical gestures can be directly and metaphorically related to “the blow of the chisel, the brushes” and these connections have not been extensively explored for the various works which constitute the Tutuguri “cycle”. This paper explores some of the complex interconnections of artistic ideas that are to be found in Rihm’s two major works of 1981-82, focusing in particular on Tutuguri parts I, VI, III and the 4th String Quartet, relating some of the essential generative conceptual ideas which inform them to examples of musical gestures and “setting” in the aforementioned works. By suggesting ways in which the actual musical materials in these compositions can be construed, our understanding of the development of these ideas in Rihm’s later music can be deepened

The Music Sound

A guide for music: compositions, events, forms, genres, groups, history, industry, instruments, language, live music, musicians, songs, musicology, techniques, terminology , theory, music video. Music is a human activity which involves structured and audible sounds, which is used for artistic or aesthetic, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The traditional or classical European aspects of music often listed are those elements given primacy in European-influenced classical music: melody, harmony, rhythm, tone color/timbre, and form. A more comprehensive list is given by stating the aspects of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Common terms used to discuss particular pieces include melody, which is a succession of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord, which is a simultaneity of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord progression, which is a succession of chords (simultaneity succession); harmony, which is the relationship between two or more pitches; counterpoint, which is the simultaneity and organization of different melodies; and rhythm, which is the organization of the durational aspects of music