A genetic programming approach to generating musical compositions

Abstract

Evolutionary algorithms have frequently been applied in the field of computer-generated art. In this paper, a novel approach in the domain of automated music composition is proposed. It is inspired by genetic programming and uses a tree-based domain model of compositions. The model represents musical pieces as a set of constraints changing over time, forming musical contexts allowing to compose, reuse and reshape musical fragments. The system implements a multi-objective optimization aiming for statistical measures and structural features of evolved models. Furthermore a correspondent domain-specific computer language is introduced used to transform domain models to a comprehensive, human-readable text representation and vice versa. The language is also suitable to limit the search space of the evolution and as a composition language for human composers.