Augmenting the Real Composer on Automated Music Composition

Abstract

Automated Music Composition (AMC) is an important aspect of the usage of com- puters in Music and it is extensively used in many commercial applications presently. Apart from instrumental music compositions, many of the other musical paradigms involve musical composition in nexus with a given set of lyrics. These compositions bear great resemblance to the lyrics provided and are sometimes composed solely based on the provided lyrics. Songs being one of the most famous examples of such types of music compositions, are greatly popular in the modern era. Many of the Automated Music Compositions techniques available today do not have the capability of correctly mapping structure and moods of lyrics to the com- position process. The author has built a computational model that would enable a potential composer to create musical compositions out of the lyrics using a set of controls, which is more robust compared to existing systems of AMC which do not take the features of the lyrics into account. The lyrics of a particular composition has a structure, contains di erent moods and encompasses rhythmic patterns or shapes which real composers take into account when setting a tune. The proposed model takes in these paradigms and automates the composition of a tune to a given set of lyrics thus augmenting the true composer by not only composing a sel ess tune but taking the real mood of an event into ac- count and tting up the composition to the event, thus giving the composition, a more natural avour. This work is delivered as a set of libraries. These have been developed on the Java platform. The outputs produced are in the form of MIDI les. The libraries can be used to design a host of applications. The generated compositions were subjected to validation by domain experts in the eld of music. The expert reposes shows that this work does generate good music compositions with a reasonable level of accuracy in theory of music, a good level of creativity and novelty. Objective of the work is to enable users to select their preferred composers and generate melodies for a given set of lyrics, thus making the user a potential composer though he might not possess all necessary skills needed by a professional composer.