Spieldose: An interactive genetic software for assisting to music composition tasks

Abstract

We describe a new software tool, called Spieldose (in English, musical box), suited to the automatic music composition task. Our system is based on the paradigm of Interactive Genetic Algorithms (abbreviated as Interactive GA) where the parent selection stage in a typical GA is made by the user according to his/her subjective criteria. The tool permits to integrate the interaction between the system and the potential users when they create their melodies. One important contribution of this work is the proposal of specific musical genetic operators (different types of crossover, mutation and improvement operators) which ensure that the generated melodies are in concordance with Music Theory and they are also nice to listening. Moreover, our software tool can be customized to a particular musical style by including the specific musical knowledge domain in the system. For validation purposes, we used Spieldose to compose different pieces corresponding to the classicism. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.