Composing music with case-based reasoning

Abstract

Music is one of the most intriguing and joyful domain of research and analysis. Driven by this insatiable curiosity, Musical Analysis has emerged to formally understand and structure music and its intrinsic intention and causality. Each complete analysis of a piece points to issues that go far beyond the normal graphical music representation. A better analysis is important not only to a better interpretation, but also to a more perfect composition. An exceptional composer is indeed an exceptional analyst. This paper presents a computational approach to music composition through the use and exploration of musical analysis. Centered on Case-Based Reasoning and Planning techniques, it consists on creating new solutions by keeping, transforming and extrapolating knowledge from already expert-made music analysis. For our approach, each analysis is represented as a precisely structured Case, divisible into all of its components. The process of composition we adopt is progressive, left-to-right, and top-to-bottom and has some similarities with (Wallas’ 1926) theory for creative production (Macedo et al. 1996a) which we adapted for this specifically structured and complex domain. The resulting implemented program has already generated several different musical pieces, which were examined and analyzed by experts, bringing up precious questions and advice.