A Functional Taxonomy of Music Generation Systems

Digital advances have transformed the face of automatic music generation since its beginnings at the dawn of computing. Despite the many breakthroughs, issues such as the musical tasks targeted by different machines and the degree to which they succeed remain open questions. We present a functional taxonomy for music generation systems with reference to existing systems. The taxonomy organizes systems according to the purposes for which they were designed. It also reveals the inter-relatedness amongst the systems. This design-centered approach contrasts with predominant methods-based surveys and facilitates the identification of grand challenges to set the stage for new breakthroughs.Comment: survey, music generation, taxonomy, functional survey, survey, automatic composition, algorithmic compositio

Creative Support Musical Composition System: a study on Multiple Viewpoints Representations in Variable Markov Oracle

Em meados do século XX, assistiu-se ao surgimento de uma área de estudo focada na geração au-tomática de conteúdo musical por meios computacionais. Os primeiros exemplos concentram-se no processamento offline de dados musicais mas, recentemente, a comunidade tem vindo a explorar maioritariamente sistemas musicais interativos e em tempo-real. Além disso, uma tendência recente enfatiza a importância da tecnologia assistiva, que promove uma abordagem centrada em escolhas do utilizador, oferecendo várias sugestões para um determinado problema criativo. Nesse contexto, a minha investigação tem como objetivo promover novas ferramentas de software para sistemas de suporte criativo, onde algoritmos podem participar colaborativamente no fluxo de composição. Em maior detalhe, procuro uma ferramenta que aprenda com dados musicais de tamanho variável para fornecer feedback em tempo real durante o processo de composição. À luz das características de multi-dimensionalidade e hierarquia presentes nas estruturas musicais, pretendo estudar as representações que abstraem os seus padrões temporais, para promover a geração de múltiplas soluções ordenadas por grau de optimização para um determinado contexto musical. Por fim, a natureza subjetiva da escolha é dada ao utilizador, ao qual é fornecido um número limitado de soluções 'ideais'. Uma representação simbólica da música manifestada como Modelos sob múltiplos pontos de vista, combinada com o autómato Variable Markov Oracle (VMO), é usada para testar a interação ideal entre a multi-dimensionalidade da representação e a idealidade do modelo VMO, fornecendo soluções coerentes, inovadoras e estilisticamente diversas. Para avaliar o sistema, foram realizados testes para validar a ferramenta num cenário especializado com alunos de composição, usando o modelo de testes do índice de suporte à criatividade.The mid-20th century witnessed the emergence of an area of study that focused on the automatic generation of musical content by computational means. Early examples focus on offline processing of musical data and recently, the community has moved towards interactive online musical systems. Furthermore, a recent trend stresses the importance of assistive technology, which pro-motes a user-in-loop approach by offering multiple suggestions to a given creative problem. In this context, my research aims to foster new software tools for creative support systems, where algorithms can collaboratively participate in the composition flow. In greater detail, I seek a tool that learns from variable-length musical data to provide real-time feedback during the composition process. In light of the multidimensional and hierarchical structure of music, I aim to study the representations which abstract its temporal patterns, to foster the generation of multiple ranked solutions to a given musical context. Ultimately, the subjective nature of the choice is given to the user to which a limited number of 'optimal' solutions are provided. A symbolic music representation manifested as Multiple Viewpoint Models combined with the Variable Markov Oracle (VMO) automaton, are used to test optimal interaction between the multi-dimensionality of the representation with the optimality of the VMO model in providing both style-coherent, novel, and diverse solutions. To evaluate the system, an experiment was conducted to validate the tool in an expert-based scenario with composition students, using the creativity support index test

Hearing the Tonality in Microtonality

In the late 1970s and 1980s, composer-pianist Easley Blackwood wrote a series of microtonal compositions exploring the tonal and modal behavior of a dozen non–twelve-tone equal temperaments, ranging from 13 to 24 tones per octave. This dissertation investigates a central paradox of Blackwood’s microtonal music: that despite being full of intervals most Western listeners have never heard before, it still seems to “make sense” in nontrivial ways. Much of this has to do with the music’s idiosyncratic approach to tonality, which I define as a regime of culturally conditioned expectations that guides one’s attentional processing of music’s gravitational qualities over time. More specifically, Blackwood configures each tuning’s unfamiliar elements in ways that correspond to certain schematic expectations Western listeners tend to have about how tonal music “works.” This is why it is still possible to hear the forest of tonality in this music, so to speak, despite the odd-sounding trees that comprise it. Because of its paradoxical blend of expectational conformance and expectational noncompliance, Blackwood’s microtonal music makes for a useful tool to snap most Western-enculturated listeners out of their ingrained modes of musical processing and reveal certain things about tonality that are often taken for granted. Accordingly, just as Blackwood writes conventional-sounding music in unconventional tunings, this dissertation rethinks several familiar music-theoretic terms and concepts through the defamiliarizing lens of microtonality. I use Blackwood’s microtonal music as a prism to shine a light on traditional theories of tonality, scale degrees, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic function, arguing that many of these theories rely on assumptions that are tacitly tied to twelve-tone equal temperament and common-practice major/minor music. By unhooking these terms and concepts from any one specific tuning or historical period, I build up a set of analytical tools that can allow one to engage more productively with the many modalities of tonality typically heard on a daily basis today. This dissertation proceeds in six chapters. The four interior chapters each center on one of the terms and concepts mentioned above: scale degrees (Chapter 2), consonance and dissonance (Chapter 3), harmonic function (Chapter 4), and tonality (Chapter 5). In Chapter 2, I propose a system for labeling scale degrees that can provide more nuance and flexibility when reckoning with music in any diatonic mode (and in any tuning). In Chapter 3, I advance an account of consonance and dissonance as expectational phenomena (rather than purely psychoacoustic ones), and I consider the ways that non-pitched elements such as meter and notation can act as “consonating” and/or “dissonating” forces. In Chapter 4, I characterize harmonic function as arising from the interaction of generic scalar position and metrical position, and I devise a system for labeling harmonic functions that is better attuned to affective differences across the diatonic modes. In Chapter 5, I synthesize these building blocks into a conception of fuzzy heptatonic diatonic tonality that links together not only all of Blackwood’s microtonal compositions but also more familiar musics that use a twelve-tone octave, from Euroclassical to popular styles. The outer chapters are less explicitly music-analytical in focus. Chapter 1 introduces readers to Blackwood’s compositional approach and notational system, considers the question of his intended audience, and discusses the ways that enculturation mediates the cognition of microtonality (and of unfamiliar music more generally). Chapter 6 draws upon archival documents to paint a more detailed picture of who Blackwood was as a person and how his idiosyncratic worldview colors his approach to composition, scholarship, and interpersonal interaction. While my nominal focus in these six chapters is Blackwood’s microtonal music, the repertorial purview of my project is far broader. One of my guiding claims throughout is that attending more closely to the paradoxes and contradictions of Blackwood’s microtonality can help one better understand the musics they are accustomed to hearing. For this reason, I frequently compare moments in Blackwood’s microtonal music to ones in more familiar styles to highlight unexpected analogies and point up common concerns. Sharing space with Blackwood in the pages that follow are Anita Baker, Ornette Coleman, Claude Debussy, and Richard Rodgers, among others—not to mention music from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fortnite, Sesame Street, and Star Wars. Ultimately, this project is a testament to the value of stepping outside of one’s musical comfort zone. For not only can this reveal certain things about that comfort zone that would not be apparent otherwise, but it can also help one think with greater nuance, precision, and (self-)awareness when “stepping back in” to reflect upon the music they know and love

Distinct neural responses to chord violations: A multiple source analysis study.

The human brain is constantly predicting the auditory environment by representing sequential similarities and extracting temporal regularities. It has been proposed that simple auditory regularities are extracted at lower stations of the auditory cortex and more complex ones at other brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex. Deviations from auditory regularities elicit a family of early negative electric potentials distributed over the frontal regions of the scalp. In this study, we wished to disentangle the brain processes associated with sequential vs. hierarchical auditory regularities in a musical context by studying the event-related potentials (ERPs), the behavioral responses to violations of these regularities, and the localization of the underlying ERP generators using two different source analysis algorithms. To this aim, participants listened to musical cadences constituted by seven chords, each containing either harmonically congruous chords, harmonically incongruous chords, or harmonically congruous but mistuned chords. EEG was recorded and multiple source analysis was performed. Incongruous chords violating the rules of harmony elicited a bilateral ERAN, whereas mistuned chords within chord sequences elicited a right-lateralized MMN. We found that the dominant cortical sources for the ERAN were localized around Broca's area and its right homolog, whereas the MMN generators were localized around the primary auditory cortex. These findings suggest a predominant role of the auditory cortices in detecting sequential scale regularities and the posterior prefrontal cortex in parsing hierarchical regularities in music

Probabilistic models for music

This thesis proposes to analyse symbolic musical data under a statistical viewpoint, using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. Our main argument is to show that it is possible to design generative models that are able to predict and to generate music given arbitrary contexts in a genre similar to a training corpus, using a minimal amount of data. For instance, a carefully designed generative model could guess what would be a good accompaniment for a given melody. Conversely, we propose generative models in this thesis that can be sampled to generate realistic melodies given harmonic context. Most computer music research has been devoted so far to the direct modeling of audio data. However, most of the music models today do not consider the musical structure at all. We argue that reliable symbolic music models such a the ones presented in this thesis could dramatically improve the performance of audio algorithms applied in more general contexts. Hence, our main contributions in this thesis are three-fold: We have shown empirically that long term dependencies are present in music data and we provide quantitative measures of such dependencies; We have shown empirically that using domain knowledge allows to capture long term dependencies in music signal better than with standard statistical models for temporal data. We describe many probabilistic models aimed to capture various aspects of symbolic polyphonic music. Such models can be used for music prediction. Moreover, these models can be sampled to generate realistic music sequences; We designed various representations for music that could be used as observations by the proposed probabilistic models

Chord sequence patterns in OWL

This thesis addresses the representation of, and reasoning on, musical knowledge in the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web that aims at describing information that is distributed on the web in a machine-processable form. Existing approaches to modelling musical knowledge in the context of the Semantic Web have focused on metadata. The description of musical content and reasoning as well as integration of content descriptions and metadata are yet open challenges. This thesis discusses the possibilities of representing musical knowledge in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) focusing on chord sequence representation and presents and evaluates a newly developed solution. The solution consists of two main components. Ontological modelling patterns for musical entities such as notes and chords are introduced in the (MEO) ontology. A sequence pattern language and ontology (SEQ) has been developed that can express patterns in a form resembling regular expressions. As MEO and SEQ patterns both rewrite to OWL they can be combined freely. Reasoning tasks such as instance classification, retrieval and pattern subsumption are then executable by standard Semantic Web reasoners. The expressiveness of SEQ has been studied, in particular in relation to grammars. The complexity of reasoning on SEQ patterns has been studied theoretically and empirically, and optimisation methods have been developed. There is still great potential for improvement if specific reasoning algorithms were developed to exploit the sequential structure, but the development of such algorithms is outside the scope of this thesis. MEO and SEQ have also been evaluated in several musicological scenarios. It is shown how patterns that are characteristic of musical styles can be expressed and chord sequence data can be classified, demonstrating the use of the language in web retrieval and as integration layer for different chord patterns and corpora. Furthermore, possibilities of using SEQ patterns for harmonic analysis are explored using grammars for harmony; both a hybrid system and a translation of limited context-free grammars into SEQ patterns have been developed. Finally, a distributed scenario is evaluated where SEQ and MEO are used in connection with DBpedia, following the Linked Data approach. The results show that applications are already possible and will benefit in the future from improved quality and compatibility of data sources as the Semantic Web evolves.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Interfacing Jazz: A Study in Computer-Mediated Jazz Music Creation And Performance

O objetivo central desta dissertação é o estudo e desenvolvimento de algoritmos e interfaces mediados por computador para performance e criação musical. É sobretudo centrado em acompanhamentos em Jazz clássico e explora um meta-controlo dos parâmetros musicais como forma de potenciar a experiência de tocar Jazz por músicos e não-músicos, quer individual quer coletivamente. Pretende contribuir para a pesquisa existente nas áreas de geração automática de música e de interfaces para expressão musical, apresentando um conjunto de algoritmos e interfaces de controlo especialmente criados para esta dissertação. Estes algoritmos e interfaces implementam processos inteligentes e musicalmente informados, para gerar eventos musicais sofisticados e corretos musical estilisticamente, de forma automática, a partir de um input simplificado e intuitivo do utilizador, e de forma coerente gerir a experiência de grupo, estabelecendo um controlo integrado sobre os parâmetros globais. A partir destes algoritmos são apresentadas propostas para diferentes aplicações dos conceitos e técnicas, de forma a ilustrar os benefícios e potencial da utilização de um meta-controlo como extensão dos paradigmas existentes para aplicações musicais, assim como potenciar a criação de novos. Estas aplicações abordam principalmente três áreas onde a música mediada por computador pode trazer grandes benefícios, nomeadamente a performance, a criação e a educação. Uma aplicação, PocketBand, implementada no ambiente de programação Max, permite a um grupo de utilizadores tocarem em grupo como uma banda de jazz, quer sejam ou não treinados musicalmente, cada um utilizando um teclado de computador ou um dispositivo iOS multitoque. O segundo protótipo visa a utilização em contextos coletivos e participativos. Trata-se de uma instalação para vários utilizadores, para ecrã multitoque, intitulada MyJazzBand, que permite até quatro utilizadores tocarem juntos como membros de uma banda de jazz virtual. Ambas as aplicações permitem que os utilizadores experienciem e participem de forma eficaz como músicos de jazz, quer sejam ou não músicos profissionais. As aplicações podem ser utilizadas para fins educativos, seja como um sistema de acompanhamento automático em tempo real para qualquer instrumentista ou cantor, seja como uma fonte de informação para procedimentos harmónicos, ou como uma ferramenta prática para criar esboços ou conteúdos para aulas. Irei também demonstrar que esta abordagem reflete uma tendência crescente entre as empresas de software musical comercial, que já começaram a explorar a mediação por computador e algoritmos musicais inteligentes.Abstract : This dissertation focuses on the study and development of computer-mediated interfaces and algorithms for music performance and creation. It is mainly centered on traditional Jazz music accompaniment and explores the meta-control over musical events to potentiate the rich experience of playing jazz by musicians and non-musicians alike, both individually and collectively. It aims to complement existing research on automatic generation of jazz music and new interfaces for musical expression, by presenting a group of specially designed algorithms and control interfaces that implement intelligent, musically informed processes to automatically produce sophisticated and stylistically correct musical events. These algorithms and control interfaces are designed to have a simplified and intuitive input from the user, and to coherently manage group playing by establishing an integrated control over global common parameters. Using these algorithms, two proposals for different applications are presented, in order to illustrate the benefits and potential of this meta-control approach to extend existing paradigms for musical applications, as well as to create new ones. These proposals focus on two main perspectives where computer-mediated music can benefit by using this approach, namely in musical performance and creation, both of which can also be observed from an educational perspective. A core framework, implemented in the Max programming environment, integrates all the functionalities of the instrument algorithms and control strategies, as well as global control, synchronization and communication between all the components. This platform acts as a base, from which different applications can be created. For this dissertation, two main application concepts were developed. The first, PocketBand, has a single-user, one-man-band approach, where a single interface allows a single user to play up to three instruments. This prototype application, for a multi- touch tablet, was the test bed for several experiments with the user interface and playability issues that helped define and improve the mediated interface concept and the instrument algorithms. The second prototype aims the creation of a collective experience. It is a multi-user installation for a multi-touch table, called MyJazzBand, that allows up to four users to play together as members of a virtual jazz band. Both applications allow the users to experience and effectively participate as jazz band musicians, whether they are musically trained or not. The applications can be used for educational purposes, whether as a real-time accompaniment system for any jazz instrument practitioner or singer, as a source of information for harmonic procedures, or as a practical tool for creating quick arrangement drafts or music lesson contents. I will also demonstrate that this approach reflects a growing trend on commercial music software that has already begun to explore and implement mediated interfaces and intelligent music algorithms