1. Final Presentation Simon McNeilly Supervisors Dr. Lloyd Allison Jon McCormack Melody Generation by Phrase

2. Outline – Why study the generation of music – Methods for music generation – Generating by a “phrase library” – Results of this method – Conclusions – Questions

3. Why Music Generation ● It’s a challenge ● Computer generated music becoming more popular

4. Desired Qualities ● Musical sound ● Interesting ● Sound similar to input music

5. Methods for Generating Music ● Composition games ● Markov models ● Grammars

6. Generating Music by Phrase ● Define a phrase as a sequence of music that is repeated and a bar or two in length ● Generate a phrase at a time ● Give high weights to repeating what has happened previously

7. Music Generation Overview ● Phrase library – Sequence of music – Time last played ● Generate weightings ● Select phrase

8. ● Read in input music from a MIDI file ● Look for repeating patterns ● Choose some of the patterns found ● Give each one an ID and a last played time Setting up the Phrase Library

9. Generation Process ● Weight phrases and randomly select one ● Play the selected phrase ● Update library and history ● Call generation function with updated history

10. Phrase Weightings ● Weighted average of different context lengths and time since last occurrence ● Higher weightings for longer context lengths ● Weight by appearances in a given context

11. What It Sounds Like ● Somewhat pleasant but boring ● Can recognise the phrases used ● Doesn’t really “go anywhere”

12. Conclusion ● System lacks ability to generate new interesting music – Mainly because it isn’t do anything large scale – Extensions to vary sound of phrases may also help

13. Conclusion ● Music produced retains aspects style from original – Preserves some harmony from original music – Will preserve rhythmic interest ● Music is “pleasant”

14. Possible Extensions ● Add repeating from history, possibly with some variation ● Give each phrase probabilities for belonging to chords, and use weightings on chord transitions ● Generate new phrases to use

15. That’s It ● Any questions?