Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ABSTRACT
We present a method for arranging the notes of certain musical scales (pentatonic, heptatonic, Blues Minor and Blues
Major) in the plane by using the idea of plane tessellation
with specially designed musical-scale tiles. The motivation
of such a representation is described, as well as the mathematical analysis of the possibility of its realization. As a
main application of the idea we introduce a bi-dimensional
designed automatic composition algorithm, at which we also
explore the target-note improvisation paradigm, by using
Markov Chains conditioned in certain events.
1. INTRODUCTION
Musical instruments can be separated in two classes regarding their input interfaces: one- or bi-dimensional. In the first
class we can put the piano, the flute, the the xylophone, the
trombone, etc. In the second, most of the string instruments
(with more than one string), button accordions, and others.
There are still instruments with both interfaces, like the piano accordion, whose melodic interface is one-dimensional
and the bass interface is bi-dimensional. So, in the first
class, notes are associated with points displayed on a line,
and in the second, on a plane.
Typically there are no redundancy of notes in one-dimensional instruments: a note with, say, fundamental frequency
f , can only be triggered at one specific position. On bidimensional instruments the contrary is the default: most
values of f would have two or more bi-dimensional points
associated with.
Bi-dimensional instruments are normally tuned in fourths
(the guitar, for example) or in fifths (like the mandolin). In
both cases, when playing the chromatic scale using more
than one row of the matrix of notes, we can see patterns (like
tiles) which repeat themself along the instrument interface.
In this work we analyze such tiles for instruments tuned
in fourths. We will show how the idea of plane tessellation
can be applied for musical scales other than the 12-notes
chromatic scale. More specifically: the Blues Minor and
Major (6-notes) and the generic pentatonic (5-notes) and
heptatonic (7-notes) scales. A simple proof of the possibility of such tiling is presented.
As a main application of the idea we introduce a bidimensional designed automatic composition algorithm, at
which we also explore the target-note improvisation paradigm,
by using Markov Chains conditioned in certain events. There
are, actually, three Markov Chains, one for each of the melody,
meter and harmony components.
The remaining of this paper is organized as follows. In
section 2 we briefly mention related works that can be found
in the literature. In section 3 the method of plane tessellation using musical-scale tiles is described and analyzed.
The bi-dimensional automatic composition algorithm based
on those tilings is detailed in Section 4. Section 5 contains
some results (including a score), and conclusions are addressed in Section 6.
2. RELATED WORK
The automatic composition algorithm we will describe shortly
has three main aspects: it is bi-dimensional designed, it has
a Markovian Process engine, and such process obeys certain
restrictions.
All these subjects have already been exploited in computer assisted composition. Computational models using
Markov Chains, for example, are used since at least 1959,
according to [7], and ideas using them keep emerging (see
[6], for instance).
The idea of constraint-composition has been used in [2].
To enable real-time composition, the solution of the related
combinatorial problem is searched for a limited amount of
time, after what the current approximation is used. We will
apply a similar idea in our method.
Regarding bi-dimensional composition, [4] (Section 4)
mention a work of Xenakis, where Brownian motion of gas
particles (in 2D) is combined with Bernoullis Law of Large
Numbers to work as engine for automatic composition.
To build the interface for bi-dimensional improvisation
we will explore the idea of tiling the plane with musicalscale tiles. Tilings also have been applied to computer assisted composition [3, 5, 1], but we have not found works
using that theory for constructing bi-dimensional interfaces
for automatic composition.
Moreover, to our knowledge the use of Markov Chains
with restrictions have not been explored yet on bi-dimensional
Figure 9. Geometrical proof of the possibility of tessellating the plane with L-like tiles such that corners x and y (see
Figure 8) meet.
4. BIDIMENSIONAL AUTOMATIC COMPOSITION
Figure 8. All presented musical scale tiles have a common L-like shape (left), and the corresponding tessellation
is such that corners x and y meet (right).
5. RESULTS
Figure 12 shows the score corresponding to a 12-bar sample
output of our method. The algorithm has many parameters
and we have found good results with the ones cited in the
previous section.
Regarding Markov Chain restrictions, the more the number of target notes, the more the number of trials the algorithm has to do satisfy the restrictions. We have seen that
for two target notes an upper bound of one thousand trials
is never reached i.e., the algorithm always find a satisfying
solution before the thousandth trial.
However, in some tests we have conducted, for more
than 4 or 5 solutions that upper bound is easily passed. We
could in this case raise up the upper bound to, say, 10, 000.
But in this case when the number of trials is high (near the
upper bound) the time consumed is such that the algorithm
can not work in real time (for tempos around 120 beats per
minute).
6. CONCLUSIONS
In this work we have presented a method for automatic composition which has three main aspects: it is bi-dimensional
based, it uses a Markov Process engine and the composition
tries to follow the target-note improvisation paradigm.
The bi-dimensional nature of the algorithm comes from
the fact that the melodic line is sampled according to a random walk in a matrix of points, whose associated notes are
Figure 12. A 12-bar sample from the automatic composition algorithm we have implemented.
modeled according to the idea of tiling the plane with music
scale tiles.
We have implemented the method for the 12-bar blues
style, using the pentatonic minor scale for the melodic line.
Technically speaking, such an algorithm is not difficult
to implement, given the simplicity of the Markov Model and
of the bi-dimensional representation of musical scales we
have used.
Regarding musical quality, the method produce nice jazzlike improvisations. Of great importance here is the fact that
only the notes of some determined scale are played.
We believe bi-dimensional inspired automatic composition is more adequate to simulate certain kinds of improvisations. The guitarist, for example, thinks about the scale
at which he is improvising, but it also uses more the notes
which are near the current note. This means that the geometry and the dimension of the instrument is of great importance, and its worth noting when building automatic composition systems.
As future work it would be interesting to use Machine
Learning techniques to estimate the transition probabilities
of notes for different styles, specially those when the instrument used for improvisation is bi-dimensional.
For more examples of music samples built using the
method described here the reader can refer the project website (to appear in the final version of this text). There he
can also download the software we have used to obtain the
hosted results.
7. REFERENCES
[1] E. Amiot, M. Andreatta, and C. Agon, Tiling the (musical) line with polynomials: Some theorethical and implementation aspects, in International Computer Music Conference, 2005.
[2] T. Anders and E. Miranda, Constraint-based composition in real time, in International Computer Music
Conference, 2008.
[3] M. Andreatta, C. Agon, and A. E., Tiling problems in
music composition: Theory and implementation, in International Computer Music Conference, 2002.
[4] P. Doornbusch, A brief survey of mapping in algorithmic composition, in International Computer Music
Conference, 2002.
[5] F. Jedrzejewski, Permutation groups and chord tessellations, in International Computer Music Conference,
2005.
[6] F. Pachet, The continuator: Musical interaction with
style, Journal of New Music Research, vol. 32, pp.
333341, Sep 2003.
[7] G. Papadopoulos and G. Wiggins, Ai methods for algorithmic composition: A survey, a critical view and
future prospects, in AISB Symposium on Musical Creativity, 1999, pp. 110117.