research-article

Functional generation of harmony and melody

Authors:

José Pedro Magalhães,

Hendrik Vincent KoopsAuthors Info & Claims

FARM '14: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN international workshop on Functional art, music, modeling & design

Pages 11 - 21

https://doi.org/10.1145/2633638.2633645

Published: 03 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

We 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 datatype that encodes the rules of tonal harmony. Then, a melody that fits to the harmony is generated in a compositional sequence: generate all "possible" melodies, filter them to remove obvious bad choices, pick one candidate note per chord, and then embellish the resulting melodic line.

At this very early stage, we aim to define a solid system as a foundation that can be used to further improve upon. We care especially about modularity, so that each individual part of the pipeline can be easily improved, and ease of adaptation, so that users can quickly adapt the generated music to their liking. The resulting system generates simple but harmonious music, and serves as a good case study on how functional programming enables quick and clean prototyping of new ideas, even in the realm of automatic music composition.

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Cited By

Cong YLeo JQuick DWinograd-Cort D(2019)Demo: counterpoint by constructionProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modeling, and Design10.1145/3331543.3342578(22-24)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3331543.3342578
Cao XZhan W(2018)Intelligent composition method for the prairie-song melodies of northern ChinaJournal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems10.3233/JIFS-1892035:5(5557-5571)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2018
https://doi.org/10.3233/JIFS-18920

Index Terms

Functional generation of harmony and melody

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cover image ACM Conferences

FARM '14: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN international workshop on Functional art, music, modeling & design

September 2014

80 pages

ISBN:9781450330398

DOI:10.1145/2633638

Conference Chairs:
Alex McLean
University of Leeds, UK
,
Mike Sperber
Active Group GmbH, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Henrik Nilsson
University of Nottingham, UK

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

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SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 03 September 2014

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Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Conference

ICFP'14

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

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%

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ICFP '25

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sigplan

ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

October 12 - 18, 2025

Singapore , Singapore

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Cited By

Cong YLeo JQuick DWinograd-Cort D(2019)Demo: counterpoint by constructionProceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modeling, and Design10.1145/3331543.3342578(22-24)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3331543.3342578
Cao XZhan W(2018)Intelligent composition method for the prairie-song melodies of northern ChinaJournal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems10.3233/JIFS-1892035:5(5557-5571)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2018
https://doi.org/10.3233/JIFS-18920

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