Computational Creativity and Music Generation Systems: An Introduction to the State of the Art

Computational Creativity is a multidisciplinary field that tries to obtain creative behaviors from computers. One of its most prolific subfields is that of Music Generation (also called Algorithmic Composition or Musical Metacreation), that uses computational means to compose music. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of this research field, it is sometimes hard to define precise goals and to keep track of what problems can be considered solved by state-of-the-art systems and what instead needs further developments. With this survey, we try to give a complete introduction to those who wish to explore Computational Creativity and Music Generation. To do so, we first give a picture of the research on the definition and the evaluation of creativity, both human and computational, needed to understand how computational means can be used to obtain creative behaviors and its importance within Artificial Intelligence studies. We then review the state of the art of Music Generation Systems, by citing examples for all the main approaches to music generation, and by listing the open challenges that were identified by previous reviews on the subject. For each of these challenges, we cite works that have proposed solutions, describing what still needs to be done and some possible directions for further research

Varianti d’autore: Invenzioni su una voce di Bruno Maderna

Author’s variants: Invenzioni su una voce by Bruno MadernaThe analogue audio documents, containing the Electronic works of the second half of the XX Century, are often the result of a transmission process whose phe-nomenology, although it presents some peculiarities, shows analogies with the tex-tual tradition. In this context, Dimensioni II. Invenzione su una voce by Bruno Mad-erna is an interesting case study: the more than twenty reviewed sources, which are different for duration, content, and recording format; the existence of at least five author’s variants; the many relations among the Helm’s text, the Berberian’s per-formance, the electronic elaborations, and the tape editing process require edition criteria able to render the tradition of the work in its complex articulation. This paper gives a detailed analysis of the audio sources of Invenzione su una voce, based on a deep knowledge of the electronic “writing system”, by mean of which the work has been generated

The Harmonic Walk : an interactive physical environment to learn tonal melody accompaniment

TheHarmonic Walkis an interactive physical environment designed for learning and practicing the accompaniment of a tonal melody. Employing a highly innovative multimedia system, the application offers to the user the possibility of getting in touch with some fundamental tonal music features in a very simple and readily available way. Notwithstanding tonal music is very common in our lives, unskilled people as well as music students and even professionals are scarcely conscious of what these features actually are. TheHarmonic Walk, through the body movement in space, can provide all these users a live experience of tonal melody structure, chords progressions, melody accompaniment, and improvisation. Enactive knowledge and embodied cognition allow the user to build an inner map of these musical features, which can be acted by moving on the active surface with a simple step. Thorough assessment tests with musicians and nonmusicians high school students could prove the high communicative power and efficiency of theHarmonic Walkapplication both in improving musical knowledge and in accomplishing complex musical tasks

CaRo 2.0: an interactive system for expressive music rendering

In several application contexts in multimedia field (educational, extreme gaming), the interaction with the user requests that system is able to render music in expressive way. The expressiveness is the added value of a performance and is part of the reason that music is interesting to listen. Understanding and modeling expressive content communication is important for many engineering applications in information technology (e.g., Music Information Retrieval, as well as several applications in the affective computing field). In this paper, we present an original approach to modify the expressive content of a performance in a gradual way, applying a smooth morphing among performances with different expressive content in order to adapt the audio expressive character to the user's desires. The system won the final stage of Rencon 2011. This performance RENdering CONtest is a research project that organizes contests for computer systems generating expressive musical performances

Harmonization and evaluation. Tweaking the parameters on human listeners

Kansei models were used to study the connotative meaning of music. In multimedia and mixed reality, automatically generated melodies are increasingly being used. It is important to consider whether and what feelings are communicated by this music. Evaluation of computer-generated melodies is not a trivial task. Considered the difficulty of defining useful quantitative metrics of the quality of a generated musical piece, researchers often resort to human evaluation. In these evaluations, often the judges are required to evaluate a set of generated pieces along with some benchmark pieces. The latter are often composed by humans. While this kind of evaluation is relatively common, it is known that care should be taken when designing the experiment, as humans can be influenced by a variety of factors. In this paper, we examine the impact of the presence of harmony in audio files that judges must evaluate, to see whether having an accompaniment can change the evaluation of generated melodies. To do so, we generate melodies with two different algorithms and harmonize them with an automatic tool that we designed for this experiment, and ask more than sixty participants to evaluate the melodies. By using statistical analyses, we show harmonization does impact the evaluation process, by emphasizing the differences among judgements

The safeguard of audio collections: a computer science based approach to quality control--the case of the sound archive of the arena di verona

In the field of multimedia, very little attention is given to the activities involved in the preservation of audio documents. At the same time, more and more archives storing audio and video documents face the problem of obsolescing and degrading media, which could largely benefit from the instruments and the methodologies of research in multimedia. This paper presents the methodology and the results of the Italian project REVIVAL, aimed at the development of a hardware/software platform to support the active preservation of the audio collection of the Fondazione Arena di Verona, one of the finest in Europe for the operatic genre, with a special attention on protocols and tools for quality control. On the scientific side, the most significant objectives achieved by the project are (i) the setup of a working environment inside the archive, (ii) the knowledge transfer to the archival personnel, (iii) the realization of chemical analyses on magnetic tapes in collaboration with experts in the fields of materials science and chemistry, and (iv) the development of original open-source software tools. On the cultural side, the recovery, the safeguard, and the access to unique copies of unpublished live recordings of artists the calibre of Domingo and Pavarotti are of great musicological and economical value

The magnetic Urtext : restoration as music interpretation

This paper discusses historical-critical thought to address the problems of restoration and preservation of tape music, proposing viable solutions to the matter of digitizing the historically valuable data that exists on and is represented by magnetic tapes. A detailed program of research and restoration and some software for helping in creation of critical editions of the musical works are proposed. We also present some of the issues and controversies that must be considered and approaches we have applied in the preservation of tape music, highlighting how these interpretations can impact later performances (playback) of these tape documents. Fundamentally, we argue that the act of tape music restoration has a parallel with the interpretation of the “Urtext score” in the performance of music from the Common Practice Era

Music Systemisers and Music Empathisers - Do They Rate Expressiveness of Computer Generated Performances the Same?

(Abstract to follow