Algorithmic composition
Algorithmic composition – composing by means of formalizable methods – has a century old tradition not only in occidental music history. This is the first book to provide a detailed overview of prominent procedures of algorithmic composition in a pragmatic way rather than by treating formalizable aspects in single works. In addition to an historic overview, each chapter presents a specific class of algorithm in a compositional context by providing a general introduction to its development and theoretical basis and describes different musical applications. Each chapter outlines the strengths, weaknesses and possible aesthetical implications resulting from the application of the treated approaches. Topics covered are: markov models, generative grammars, transition networks, chaos and self-similarity, genetic algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks and artificial intelligence are covered. The comprehensive bibliography makes this work ideal for the musician and the researcher alike.
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What Hacker News says
- Algorithmic composition is a decently-sized field. Here's a textbook:
http://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Composition-Paradigms-Auto...
And some more examples:
- > What do you mean by "better"
More convincing/realistic musical performance. Imagine there was a "Turing test" for music composition and performance and the goal was to convince a trained musician that the performer behind the curtain was a true human being, not a robot.
> There is a market for "band-in-a-box"
Right, and the tool became much better since they use "real tracks", i.e. played by real musicians; I suppose in future these can be complemented by tracks generated by connectionist models like the ones used by MuseNet et al.
> see something like Curtis Roads CMT for a historical overview of paradigms.
See also Deep Learning Techniques for Music Generation -- A Survey: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01620
and Algorithmic Composition - Paradigms of Automated Music Generation: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-211-75540-2
- > I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in the concept particularly with more 'complex' genres
Well, you're in good company. This goes back for many decades. Here is a summary of many attempts during this time: https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Composition-Paradigms-Aut.... Really convincing composition started to appear only recently using transformers, e.g. https://openai.com/blog/musenet/. The present solution is a rather primitive one in comparison.
- There are many ideas, even books full of ideas (see e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Composition-Paradigms-Aut...), but I rarely hear an example which is not disappointing. Recent developments seem to produce better results. If you're interested in a current approach with very promising results see e.g. https://openai.com/blog/musenet/.
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