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| Music Engine: Automatic Music Analysis and Creation | |
| The project relies on the capability to automatically analyze and manipulate musical material. A software-based music engine is utilized to create new musical passages, composed of transformations of parts extracted from existing musical passages. The software identifies within each piece musical building blocks that can be manipulated harmonically and rhythmically to produce variations and hybrids of existing pieces. This capability to remix and combine music parts has historically been restricted to those with specialized talents: DJ's, composers, jazz musicians, producers. Software programs such as Apple's GarageBand, and various ring-tone mashers, provide the capability to remix musically compatible parts. In this project musical parts must be automatically combined into new pieces without the intervention of a trained musician. And it is not assumed that parts drawn from different musical pieces are musically compatible. Adjustments to musical structure are carried out as needed to create and maintain musical coherence. Additional transformations are performed in order to introduce musical variations. The software is implemented in object-oriented programming language Squeak, a dialect of Smalltalk. Low-level functionality parses each piece into its constituent building blocks; genetic algorithms are used as a parallel-search strategy for cohering harmonic and rhythmic structure with new combinations of those building blocks. Below is actual output from the existing desktop composition application (video captures of the mixing module the app and the music it produces). The proposed piece will use this same technology. The actions demonstrated below would be driven by the musical selections and interactions of the participants, rather than controlled through the current GUI. |
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| Screenshot: Music Engine: Composition Application |
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Music Engine: Demonstrations in MP4 format (click each image to watch video)
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| example 1 (mp4: 18.4 MB) [ open ] |
example 2 (mp4: 14.9 MB) [ open ] |
example 3 (mp4: 16.6 MB) [ open ] |
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Musical pieces within a shared space are woven into new pieces.
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Musical results based on a different combination of input pieces.
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Algorithmically controlled arrangement of musical variations.
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contact: info@tone23.org