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.
Keywords
- Algorithmic composition
- Hill-climbing
- Grammar
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- 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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Acknowledgments
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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31008-4_8
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