evoDrummer: Deriving rhythmic patterns through interactive genetic algorithms

Abstract

Drum rhythm automatic construction is an important step towards the design of systems which automatically compose music. This work describes a novel mechanism that allows a system, namely the evoDrummer, to create novel rhythms with reference to a base rhythm. The user interactively defines the amount of divergence between the base rhythm and the generated ones. The methodology followed towards this aim incorporates the utilization of Genetic Algorithms and allows the evoDrummer to provide several alternative rhythms with specific, controlled divergence from the selected base rhythm. To this end, the notion of rhythm divergence is also introduced, based on a set of 40 drum-specific features. Four population initialization schemes are discussed and an extensive experimental evaluation is provided. The obtained results demonstrate that, with proper population initialization, the evoDrummer is able to produce a great variety of rhythmic patterns which accurately encompass the desired divergence from the base rhythm. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.