Using Formal Grammars as Musical Genome

Abstract

In this paper, we explore a generative music method that can compose atonal and tonal music in different styles. One of the main differences between regular engineering problems and artistic expressions is that goals and constraints are usually ill-defined in the latter case; in fact the rules here could or should be transgressed more regularly. For this reason, our approach does not use a pre-existing dataset to imitate or extract rules from. Instead, it uses formal grammars as a representation method than can retain just the basic features, common to any form of music (e.g., the appearance of rhythmic patterns, the evolution of tone or dynamics during the composition, etc.). Exploring different musical spaces is the responsibility of a program interface that translates musical specifications into the fitness function of a genetic algorithm. This function guides the evolution of those basic features enabling the emergence of novel content. In this study, we then assess the outcome of a particular music specification (guitar ballad) in a controlled real-world setup. As a result, the generated music can be considered similar to human-composed music from a perceptual perspective. This endorses our approach to tackle arts algorithmically, as it is able to produce novel content that complies with human expectations.