Learning and blending harmonies in the context of a melodic harmonisation assistant

Abstract

How can harmony in diverse idioms be represented in a machine learning system and how can learned harmonic descriptions of two musical idioms be blended to create new ones? This paper presents a creative melodic harmonisation assistant that employs statistical learning to learn harmonies from human annotated data in practically any style, blends the harmonies of two user-selected idioms and harmonises user-input melodies. To this end, the category theory algorithmic framework for conceptual blending is utilised for blending chord transition of the input idioms, to generate an extended harmonic idiom that incorporates a creative combination of the two input ones with additional harmonic material. The results indicate that by learning from the annotated data, the presented harmoniser is able to express the harmonic character of diverse idioms in a creative manner, while the blended harmonies extrapolate the two input idioms, creating novel harmonic concepts.