Algorithmic music generation by harmony recombination with genetic algorithm

Algorithmic music composition has recently become an area of prestigious research in projects such as Google’s Magenta, Aiva, and Sony’s CSL Lab aiming to increase the composers’ tools for creativity. There are advances in systems for music feature extraction and generation of harmonies with short-time and long-time patterns of music style, genre, and motif. However, there are still challenges in the creation of poly-instrumental and polyphonic music, pieces become repetitive and sometimes these systems copy the original files. The main contribution of this paper is related to the improvement of generating new non-plagiary harmonic developments constructed from the symbolic abstraction from MIDI music non-labeled data with controlled selection of rhythmic features based on evolutionary techniques. Particularly, a novel approach for generating new music compositions by replacing existing harmony descriptors in a MIDI file with new harmonic features from another MIDI file selected by a genetic algorithm. This allows combining newly created harmony with a rhythm of another composition guaranteeing the adjustment of a new music piece to a distinctive genre with regularity and consistency. The performance of the proposed approach has been assessed using artificial intelligent computational tests, which assure goodness of the extracted features and shows its quality and competitiveness.

Timbre in the Musical Performance as a Result of Audio-Mental Operations

The aim of this paper is to reveal the relationship between the timbre, i.e. sound quality, obtained by an instrumentalist when playing a music piece, and the role of the hearing, listening, and other musical specific mental operations that take place in the brain of the instrumentalist during the performance, with the focus on the classical music, which depends in the most cases on the score. The timbre is a characteristic of every instrument or voice that makes their tone unique. It is given by the different sound components (partials) with different frequencies and amplitudes. The number and the amplitude of the partials are different from instrument to instrument; they depend on the construction of the instrument and on the art of playing, the last being the point in this article. It is known that timbre has an emotional impact on the perception. Its semantic features are represented through descriptors as: dark, bright, round, dull, dry, harsh, etc. that have to be created by the performers, in order to affect the auditory. Thus, they have to possess a good technique, able to get different timbres. Although, the technique has to be subordinated to the capacity of hearing in advance the sound with all its features: pitch, duration, intensity and timbre.

How to Retrieve Music using Mood Tags in a Folksonomy

A folksonomy is a classification system in which volunteers collaboratively create and manage tags to annotate and categorize content. The folksonomy has several problems in retrieving music using tags, including problems related to synonyms, different tagging levels, and neologisms. To solve the problem posed by synonyms, we introduced a mood vector with 12 possible moods, each represented by a numeric value, as an internal tag. This allows moods in music pieces and mood tags to be represented internally by numeric values, which can be used to retrieve music pieces. To determine the mood vector of a music piece, 12 regressors predicting the possibility of each mood based on acoustic features were built using Support Vector Regression. To map a tag to its mood vector, the relationship between moods in a piece of music and mood tags was investigated based on tagging data retrieved from Last.fm, a website that allows users to search for and stream music. To evaluate retrieval performance, music pieces on Last.fm annotated with at least one mood tag were used as a test set. When calculating precision and recall, music pieces annotated with synonyms of a given query tag were treated as relevant. These experiments on a real-world data set illustrate the utility of the internal tagging of music. Our approach offers a practical solution to the problem caused by synonyms.

role of the Chinese piano school in the formation of the Chinese piano art

The relevance of the study is that the integrative role of compulsory piano learning in music education acquires the knowledge and skills of conscious work, which is considered the mainstream of the formation of the art of pianism in China. Most of it is conducted and implemented in territorially different environments of music schools to acquire knowledge, themes of perception of musical text, recognizing the degree of use of inherent potential of additional piano features related to increasing the effectiveness of learning activities. In the context of piano schools, a large number of students perceive the subject only as a hobby. For them, these measures are often reduced to the implementation of appropriate programmes. The piano, like any other subject, develops musicality and promotes reflection on the music piece. For some, the musical art of pianism acts as the only way to stimulate the harmonious imagination through which it is possible to learn to listen to chords. The piano is a unique source of inspiration for further musical development. The aim of the study is to reveal and examine the role of the Chinese piano school in the formation of Chinese art of pianism.

Soundscape composition analysis combined with acoustics and musicology: a case study on the music piece of Daybreaking

With its own unique musical vocabulary oundscape composition has been unprecedently developed all over the world. The analysis of music s from the perspective of acoustics has its own advantages that cannot be replaced by the traditional musicology. Based on music named Dayb for a hope to overcome COVID-19, this paper analyzes the acoustic elements of , frequency spectrum and waveform. Combined with the traditional musicology, it can show that the undulation of waveform has associated with the formal structure and the visualization of music. The frequency spectrum shows that as the climax of the piece, the sound has a high energy in the range of 300-1000Hz, which is one of the extremely sensitive frequency ranges for human. The composer not only skillfully integrates the chanting of monks with the complex environmental sounds, but also reflects the innovative composition skills. The change of from weak to strong or contrarily is also in line with the emotional expression, that is, the core idea of moving from nature to nature. Since soundscape c retains more information, it is easier to immerse the audience in the listening process and appreciate the beautiful hope rather than the difficulty of understanding it.

Efficient Algorithmic Music Composition Using Neural Networks

Creating aesthetically pleasing music via algorithmic composition has continually been an ambitious goal of music research. Memory-based neural networks have shown to be particularly suited for this type of sequential learning. Music scores data is commonly used to represent different music features–such as durations and pitches–which when combined, make up the entirety of a music piece. As more music features are integrated into the music composition process, the space of labels required to represent possible feature combinations in a neural network grows significantly and rather quickly making the process computationally challenging, to say the least. This consideration bears special importance in situations with polyphonic pieces, where additional features such as harmonies and multiple voices are present. This research highlights the potential benefits of feature separation in music composition from music scores data. More specifically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of neural networks for automated music composition by learning music features separately; we start by creating separate simple models, one for each desired music feature, and then combine results from the simple models to compose new music. This is in contrast to the common practice of employing a single complex model trained over multiple features simultaneously. Case study evaluation results show significant time savings for our proposed approach with similar music “quality” compared to the complex model.

THE INNER GAME CONCEPT AS A METHOD OF MUSIC COACHING

Maximizing musician’s potential and creating effective performing skills in the process of their musical education and during the further professional development, as well as overcoming their own fears, doubts and limiting beliefs, particularly during performing in public, are still actual tasks both for musicians and their teachers.One effective approach to developing musician's creative potential is coaching. Coaching is based on a dialogue between the coach and the student (coachee); the coach proposes a series of questions aimed on assisting the student in finding their own solution of the problem. It has been known for a long time that the inner state of a person significantly impacts effectiveness of their actions. The Inner Game concept proposed by Timothy Gallwey is a coaching methodology designed to overcome inner obstacles in reaching person’s goals. Those obstacles are of mental nature and include loss of concentration, nervousness and self-doubt. What distinguishes the Inner Game from other coaching methods is that it utilizes statements and tasks that often do not require the student’s verbal answer (moreover, such verbal answer often cannot be given at all), but rather stimulate them to pay attention to their senses and to experiment (for example, in finding optimal position during playing an instrument or choosing proper dynamics for a certain music piece).The first principle of the Inner Game points out the fact that the quality of person’s performance depends not only on their potential (talent, skills, knowledge, etc.), but also on the level of self-interference (mental digression, untimely self-criticism, lack of confidence, fear, etc.).Traditional approach to improving performance suggests working on increasing the potential; the idea of the Inner Game is to decrease self-interference in order to bring the quality of the performance as close to the potential as possible.To describe the inner dialogue taking place inside person’s mind, notions of Self 1 and Self 2 are used. Self 1 is the source of self-interference, it contains person’s ideas about how the thins should be, their judgements and associations. Self 2 is our inner potential, it includes our natural talents, abilities and skills. The methods of the Inner Game are used to decrease self-interference (impact of the Self 1) and help the performer to enter the ideal state during performance, the state of relaxed concentration.

Music Thinking Process: Unfolding the creation of the piece Résonances manifestes

Beyond the social and even the human, sound opens onto the intertwining of movements animating the lived experience. A sonic epistemology considers not only that the acoustic ecologies are enunciative of social relations and power dynamics, but also that they tell about the way reality is lived, experienced, organised: they are expressive, in themselves. This means, for an epistemology of phonosophy, that every perception of a sound implies a conceptual movement, which carries a mental dimension that could become the material for another thinking practice, for a sophia. This article approaches music as thinking in itself: a thought of the sonic. This affirmation will be expanded through the contribution of process philosophy (Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, Manning, etc.), which allows a musical event to be considered as an ecology, produced by the encounter of a multiplicity of bodies (human, sonic, technological, etc.). The processes of capture of forces involved and the different techniques required to increase the expressive potentialities of the musical assemblage will be unfolded through the case of Résonances manifestes, a comprovised music piece based on a sound score composed of field recordings from autonomous demonstrations.