Automatic Music Composition with Evolutionary Algorithms: Digging into the Roots of Biological Creativity

Abstract

Music composition is considered an expression of human creativity, even if composers (like artists, in general) take inspiration from other sources (like Nature sounds, and—mostly—other authors). Similarly, the algorithmic composition of music usually follows an imitative approach, by feeding a computer system with a large corpus of existing (human-made) scores. Here we investigate the composition of music from a different perspective: as a discovery process of aesthetically pleasing musical patterns.