Evolutionary Music Composition

Abstract

Evolutionary music composition refers to machine-based generation of musical pieces by means of evolutionary computation techniques. In this chapter we discuss machine-based music composition from several viewpoints. First, techniques used to machine-based music composition are reviewed. Second, music composition subtasks, such as generating melodies, harmonization of musical phrases and generating rhythm patterns or composition of a rhythm accompaniment are introduced. Third, two distinct approaches to the evaluation of generated music are discussed: interactive evaluation based on human mentor's judgement and autonomous evaluation of generated musical material by the system itself. The rest of the chapter describes six recognized evolutionary systems for music composition in detail. In particular, the description is focused to the design of evolutionary algorithms behind these systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.