Abstract
An algorithmic compositional system that uses hill climbing to create short melodies is presented. A context free grammar maps each section of the resultant individual to a musical segment resulting in a series of MIDI notes described by pitch and duration. The dissimilarity between each pair of segments is measured using a metric based on the pitch contour of the segments. Using a GUI, the user decides how many segments to include and how they are to be distanced from each other. The system performs a hill-climbing search using several mutation operators to create a population of segments the desired distances from each other. A number of melodies composed by the system are presented that demonstrate the algorithm’s ability to match the desired targets and the versatility created by the inclusion of the designed grammar.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that the NC methods use less as each Copy in each of the 1,000 generations requires one evaluation.
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This work is part of the App’Ed (Applications of Evolutionary Design) project funded by Science Foundation Ireland under grant 13/IA/1850.
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Loughran, R., McDermott, J., O’Neill, M. (2016). Grammatical Music Composition with Dissimilarity Driven Hill Climbing. In: Johnson, C., Ciesielski, V., Correia, J., Machado, P. (eds) Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design. EvoMUSART 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9596. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31008-4_8
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