In this paper we explore techniques for generating new music using a
Variational Autoencoder (VAE) neural network that was trained on a corpus of
specific style. Instead of randomly sampling the latent states of the network
to produce free improvisation, we generate new music by querying the network
with musical input in a style different from the training corpus. This allows
us to produce new musical output with longer-term structure that blends aspects
of the query to the style of the network. In order to control the level of this
blending we add a noisy channel between the VAE encoder and decoder using
bit-allocation algorithm from communication rate-distortion theory. Our
experiments provide new insight into relations between the representational and
structural information of latent states and the query signal, suggesting their
possible use for composition purposes
