Exploring melody space in a live context using declarative functional programming
Pages 25 - 31
Abstract
This paper introduces Composer, a system offering composition capabilities for live performance, requiring no prior experience with composition and programming. Current research in computer assisted composition is focused on offline composition. A composer is seen as a person that composes pieces of music which are then performed at a later date, either by the composer or an artist. There has been work done in computer assisted live performance, but the focus in that field has mainly been on the live generation of synthesizers and novel, virtual instruments and musical interfaces. Unlike existing systems, Composer is intended to be used in a live context for the composition of novel melodies. The system makes no assumptions about the user's existing experience as a composer or a programmer. Instead of giving the user unbounded freedom, the system only allows the user to manipulate key properties of the desired melodies. The constraints the user can put on the melodies are the scale or mode in which the melody is set; the tonic note of the scale or mode; the cadence of the melody; the tempo of the melody; and the relative gap-size between notes in the melody. These rules are modelled using a declarative programming model that also supports automatic enumeration of the space of valid melodies. As complete enumeration of this search space is infeasible in a live context, experiments have been performed and their results are presented, to limit the size of the enumerated space while still yielding sufficient variation in the composed pieces. Furthermore, the general system design is presented and it is discussed how choices concerning the inter-communication between components in the system helps the system to be responsive and usable in a live composition context.
References
[1]
http://clojure.org/
[2]
https://github.com/clojure/core.async
[3]
https://github.com/clojure/core.logic
[4]
http://overtone.github.io/
[5]
http://hexler.net/software/touchosc
[6]
http://monome.org/
[7]
https://github.com/tgk/composer
[8]
S. Aaron, A.F. Blackwell, R. Hoadley and T. Regan. A principled approach to developing new languages for live coding In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 30 May-1 June 2011, Oslo, Norway.
[9]
S. Aaron and J. Judge. Snapshots: new possibilities for social digital music-making arising from the storage of history In Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC'12). September 9-14, 2012, IRZU Institute for Sonic Arts Research, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
[10]
A.E. Abdallah, C.B. Jones, and J.W. Sanders Communicating Sequential Processes: The First 25 Years. LNCS 3525. Springer.
[11]
T. Anders Composing Music by Composing Rules: Design and Usage of a Generic Music Constraint System Ph.D. thesis. School of Music & Sonic Arts, Queen's University Belfast.
[12]
T. Anders and E. R. Miranda A Survey of Constraint Programming Systems for Modeling Music Theories and Composition In ACM Computing Surveys. 43(4).
[13]
W. E. Byrd Relational Programming in miniKanren: Techniques, Applications, and Implementations. Dissertation. September 30, 2009, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
[14]
R. Hickey The Clojure programming language In Proceedings of the 2008 symposium on Dynamic Languages. July 8, 2008, Paphos, Cyprus
[15]
C.A.R. Hoare. Communicating sequential processes In Communications of the ACM 21 (8): 666677. 1978.
[16]
H.V. Koops, J.P. Magalhães and W. Bas de Haas. A functional approach to automatic melody harmonisation In Proceedings of the first ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Functional art, music, modeling & design (FARM '13). September 28, 2013, Boston, MA, USA.
[17]
J. McCartney, SuperCollider. A new real time synthesis language In Procedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC96). August, 1996, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
[18]
A.G. Stead, A.F. Blackwell and S. Aaron. Graphic score grammars for end-users In Proceedings of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME12). May 21 23, 2012, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
[19]
C. Truchet, G. Assayag and P. Codognet. OMClouds, a Heuristic Solver for Musical Constraints In MIC2003, The Fifth Metaheuristics International Conference. August 25 28, 2003, Kyoto, Japan.
[20]
M. Wright, and A. Freed Open Sound Control: A New Protocol for Communicating with Sound Synthesizers In Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference (ICMC'97). September 25-30, 1997, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Index Terms
- Exploring melody space in a live context using declarative functional programming
Recommendations
Functional generation of harmony and melody
FARM '14: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN international workshop on Functional art, music, modeling & designWe present FComp, a system for automatic generation of harmony and accompanying melody. Building on previous work on functional modelling of musical harmony, FComp first creates a foundational harmony by generating random (but user-guided) values of a ...
A functional approach to automatic melody harmonisation
FARM '13: Proceedings of the first ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Functional art, music, modeling & designMelody harmonisation is a centuries-old problem of long tradition, and a core aspect of composition in Western tonal music. In this work we describe FHarm, an automated system for melody harmonisation based on a functional model of harmony. Our system ...
Beat Boxing: expressive control for electronic music performance and musical applications
NIME '05: Proceedings of the 2005 conference on New interfaces for musical expressionThis paper describes the design and implementation of Beat Boxing, a percussive gestural interface for the live performance of electronic music and control of computer-based games and musical activities.
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
September 2014
80 pages
ISBN:9781450330398
DOI:10.1145/2633638
- Conference Chairs:
- Alex McLean,
- Mike Sperber,
- Program Chair:
- Henrik Nilsson
Copyright © 2014 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 03 September 2014
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Conference
ICFP'14
Sponsor:
ICFP'14: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming
September 6, 2014
Gothenburg, Sweden
Acceptance Rates
FARM '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 15 submissions, 80%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 19 of 23 submissions, 83%
Upcoming Conference
ICFP '25
- Sponsor:
- sigplan
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 105Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)0
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 12 Nov 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Get Access
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in