miércoles, 27 de enero de 2010

Algorithmic music generation

Because I have studied music as well as computer engineering, I am interested in all topics that involve computer science and music. I have researched a little bit on algorithmic composition and created a tool that can generate music based on cyclic series. It is inspired by the theory of serialism, specially the theory behind dodecaphony.


The tool pretends to answer the question: can beautiful music be created by only using the rules of serialism?

In short, what this tool does is generate music by using a simple rule: repeating a series of notes in such a way that none of the notes is more important than the rest. You generate a series of notes and the program will play it according to some parameters. You can shuffle the serie from time to time, transpose it, use retrograde or inverted series and even assign basic series of durations and intensities.

The resulting MIDI file can be opened with any music editor and mixed with your favourite instruments.

When doing algorithmic composition programming, there is always the risk of ending up creating yet another random music generator (though there are some funny random music generators out there, and even serious projects with awesome mechanics involved). In my case I decided to create something simple and controllable, so that you always know what's going on and can therefore change parameters based on something, not just on pure chance.