Dissertation uploaded

21st April 2008

My dissertation is now finished and available to download.

To what extent can computers be programmed to compose music?

Tags: dissertation

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Microsoft MySong

8th April 2008

Microsoft are developing a program called MySong, which lets users sing into a microphone, and produces a chord sequence over the top. It's a lot harder to achieve than it sounds, and the videos I've seen show it working quite well.

Tags: dissertation, MOSAIC

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The Creativity Machine

14th March 2008

Back in the late 80s, an AI researcher called Steve Thaler designed a neural network program he later dubbed 'The Creativity Machine'. What was special about this program was that, given enough examples, it would design its own products. The Creativity Machine designed cars, soft drinks and even music. It generated 11,000 sequences of pop music, which Thaler sent off straight away to be copyrighted! Apparently there's an album of music by the Creativity Machine, which I'll have to track down.

In just over a month I will have finished my dissertation. That's a scary thought.

Tags: dissertation, MOSAIC

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Cellular automata

25th February 2008

I've been looking into Cellular automata (CA) as part of my dissertation research. CA are a form of genetic algorithms, which are often used to show a visual representation of artificial life (alife). Apparently they are quite popular for music-generating too.

I'm disappointed to find that examples of CA music (eg. Miranda's CAMUS (1991)) aren't that great at producing aesthetically pleasing music. I doubt I'll be using CA in my project unless I uncover some more promising research.

Tags: MOSAIC, dissertation

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Contemporary Music

23rd February 2008

I've just come back from a concert at the University of Plymouth Contemporary Music Festival, featuring performances from members of the university's computer music research group, ICCMR. I enjoyed most of the performances, but the one that particularly caught my eye was Marcelo Gimenes' Interactive Musical Environments (iMe).

This performance featured Marcelo playing improv jazz with the iMe computer program, which seemed to mimic and improvise with Marcelo. It was very entertaining and fascinating to watch and listen to.

Tags: dissertation, MOSAIC

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Project - Progress Report #3

22nd February 2008

I'm now entering the final stretch of my degree: the last three months. It's pretty scary thinking that my project has to be handed in on 9 May, when I haven't really started making it yet!

My idea seems a lot more solid than it did in previous posts. I'm making a sound toy with artificial intelligence (to produce music) and am releasing it as an open work. This means that when others use it, even though their compositions will be unique to them, they will be using my designed style of writing music.

The big query is how I'm going to make it. Do I use Flash to get my finished applet to as many people as possible to play with? Or do I use Multimedia Fusion so I can confidently create the project in as little time as possible? I'm tempted to use MMF, as most people have access to a Windows PC, but if I was confident enough, Flash would be preferred.

To prototype the project I created a collection of sound toys for the Sound Practice module. This was worthwhile as I got to experiment with four different designs for toys and also with note probabilities (not unlike Hiller and Isaacson used for their Illiad Suite (1957)).

For this project, I'll focus on one large sound toy, rather than several small ones. And I'll only employ two or three methods of autonomous composition, selected from research for my dissertation. I'll then distribute it on the web and to as many of my friends and family as possible and ask them to record a piece they made with it.

The resulting project will be a demonstration of the program and the algorithms behind it, along with a collection of unique, but similar sounding(?) compositions made with the program.

Wish me luck!

Tags: MOSAIC, dissertation

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Electroplankton

29th January 2008

As research for my sound project and final year project, I've been playing sound artist Toshio Iwai's Electroplankton for the DS.

With Electoplankton the player can choose one of ten sound toy environments to make music in, and then tap and drag objects in the play area to manipulate music. There is also some basic microphone recording in the game.

Electroplankton is a fun pickup-and-play music toy that I'd recommend to anyone. The following is a short critique of the game, where I outline it's strengths and weaknesses:

Short critique of Electroplankton

The game has been designed so that resulting music sounds aesthetically pleasing regardless of the player's actions. They can quite happily randomly tap on the screen wherever and whenever, or with their Master's Degree in composition they can carefully choose what they do. Both these methods will create fairly pleasing soundscapes, more often than not. This isn't a bad thing; It allows the game to be accessible to everyone, not just musicians and in fact it's probably aimed more at the musically-challenged, who don't have much experience in creating music. I suppose Electroplankton could even spark a child's interest in music and encourage them to learn an instrument.

However, this feature leaves the game without any challenge whatsoever. So perhaps calling it a game isn't quite accurate. The term 'game' is a vague word that people tend to have different definitions for. In my eyes, a game is an organised enjoyable activity, with rules, objectives, interactivity and challenge. Electroplankton doesn't have challenge, so in my opinion it's not a game, it's a toy. I'll probably refer to Electroplankton as a game anyway, as that's how Nintendo have marketed the product.

I've analysed each of the ten environments in Electroplankton. Here are my thoughts on a few of them:

(3) Luminaria - possibly my favourite of the ten environments. This level comprises of a 6x6 grid of 'notes' in the natural G minor scale (no sharpened 7th). The scale is obvious when each note is tapped in order. There are also four 'plankton', acting as instruments that navigate the grid and sound the note of the corresponding grid reference when they touch it. The plankton move at different speeds too, but in time with each other (ie on the beat). The player only really controls the directions the plankton move in, by rotating the facing direction of each note. The effect is like four people playing random notes of the Gm scale with different sounding vibraphones, but because they all play in time it doesn't sound quite as bad as I thought it should.

(5) Rec Rec - a very simple multi-tracking environment where players can use the microphone to record their voice onto one of four tracks, which loops every bar and is played simultaneously with the other tracks. Good fun, but in this unusual case, is only as creative as the player. A drum beat is played over the top to enhance the music, else it would sound very dry.

(7) Lumiloop - Just five notes that players can activate. The notes are of a pentatonic scale (C D E G A), so most combinations of them don't sound too bad. The hook in this game is the circular spinning gestures the player has to use; if a note is spun fast enough, an overtone of an octave can be heard.

(8) Marine Snow - It seems to me that Toshio Iwai was running out of ideas when he created this environment. Like Luminaria, there's a grid of notes, this time in the Natural F Minor scale. Tapping a grid reference sounds the note, which then swaps positions with the last note tapped. The only way to make a tune, is to randomly squiggle the touch screen. Very dull, and musically not as strong as the others.

Overall I was surprised at the lack of composition algorithms were used, I assumed there would need to be some in order to make the music sound aesthetically pleasing. Instead, the game uses very basic music theory (simple time, instruments and scales) to produce surprisingly pleasant-sounding results. I was hoping for something more musically clever to research though.

Electroplankton doesn't let players save the state of each environment to return to later. This can be quite annoying if a player has worked hard to mould the environment to something they really like. For example, using Rec Rec players can record samples at specific times in the loop. As soon as they exit the Rec Rec environment, their samples are lost.

Also, each environment is only designed to be played on its own. A player cannot use multiple environments together, without running a copy of the game on another DS. It would have been nice to at least be able to minimise an environment and leave it running in the background while you play with another one. (That's not to say they'd all work together - looking at the scales used I wouldn't recommend it! But they could have been designed to work well with each other.)

You can see Luminaria, Lumiloop and a few other environments in action in this YouTube video.

Tags: music, games, soundspace, MOSAIC, dissertation

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First chapter written

21st January 2008

The introduction to my dissertation has now been written, but it's a little rough and unfinished, with not as many examples as I would have liked. I'm unsure of how good/relavent a lot of it is, so I'll have to see what my supervisor, Geoff says about it.

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Great new book

16th January 2008

Back in the library, I've discovered David Cope has written an excellent book on 'Computer models of Musical Creativity', which is very informative and well written. He discusses seven common principles for algorithmic composition: rules-based, data-driven, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, neural networks, mathematical modeling and sonification. He also talks about his incredible EMI program.

Tags: dissertation

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A soundtrack to life

8th January 2008

Today I've been pondering about autonomous composition again. There's a Family Guy episode where Peter manages to get his own theme music that reflects his current situation whether he's getting up, walking to the shops, emotionally moved by the homeless, or just riding on a bus. It's a very funny clip, and I've used it before in an AI music presentation as an example of personal theme music.

But I was wondering today how possible that idea actually is. Most of us already do something similar. Whatever mood we're in, there's nearly always a certain style of music we can put on to enhance the atmosphere. For example, if you are feeling quite low you might put on some slow, mellow music to soothe you, or maybe when you're excited you might play some loud feel-good happy fanfares! Regardless of your personal taste, there is nearly always something that you feel like listening to, to reflect your mood or situation. (Themes from Pirates of the Caribbean make great driving music by the way!)

The next stage is to link our brains to a program that reads our emotions or moods and selects relevant music. There is already a lot of research into this.

And finally we can even replace our favourite familiar tracks with autonomous music, created on-the-fly as our situations and moods change, just like Peter in Family Guy.

Of course, we'd have to keep our own music to ourselves, so not to cause sound pollution or invade someone's 'personal musical space'. Or perhaps in the future it could be a new form of reading someone's current situation, just as we read face expressions all the time today?

Regardless, I'd love to try out such a system one day, as long as there's an off switch built in!

Tags: music, dissertation, MOSAIC

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New year, new term

7th January 2008

Happy new year! I hope yours is less of a panic than mine will be...

In total I've got six rather large projects to hand in before May. That's two DirectX projects for Programming, a project for Sound, a team project for Games Design that seems to be behind schedule, a 10,000 word dissertation and a 40-credit final year project, which I still don't really have a direction for.

Everything I'm working on this year is going to be very exciting no doubt, but also very stressful. Wish me luck!

Tags: games, programming, dissertation, MOSAIC, sound

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Experiments in Musical Intelligence

4th January 2008

It seems I've totally underestimated the capabilities of computers to create music - I've just discovered David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) program. It basically is given music by a specific composer and spits out new music in their style. I was skeptical until I heard some of the output music, which I think sounds very much like the style of the original composers (e.g. Beethoven, Chopin, Joplin)

Listen to EMI-produced music

Tags: dissertation, music, MOSAIC

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New chapter for dissertation

18th December 2007

I've decided two include a third chapter for my dissertation: Computers versus Humans. In this chapter I'll talk about the differences between computer human approaches to composing music.

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'Machine Musicanship'

10th December 2007

53 pages into Machine Musicianship shows me that it isn't actually that great. It's very much a technical demonstration of the ways computers can produce music, and isn't that well written in my opinion. I'll be skim-reading the rest of it.

Tags: dissertation

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Dissertation and Final Year Project

7th November 2007

One and a half months into my final year of uni, I've now started doing research for my dissertation and final year project. The two are meant to be connected in some way, one complimenting the other, so I have chosen the subject of generative computer music to link them.

For my dissertation I will be researching the extent of which computers can compose music. There is lots of research into this field so my aim is to bring some of the main ideas together, summarise and discuss them and present them as a brief guide.

My project, worth twice as many marks, will be using this research to compose generative autonomous music. I am uncertain how focused the style or methods of composition will be yet, or even if any human input will influence the software. I will be using Max/MSP to create the program, which I have now started a love/hate relationship with. I have started by creating a simple synth that the program will use to perform the music.

Stay tuned for updates, which I hope to post quite regularly.

Tags: dissertation, MOSAIC

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Books for dissertation

4th November 2007

I've been skim-reading over a book by Eduardo Reck Miranda called 'Composing music with computers', which although in parts looks a bit technical, has some excellent methods for composing algorithmic music. I expect I will be referencing it a lot in my dissertation.

I've also ordered Robert Rowe's book 'Machine Muscianship'.

Tags: dissertation

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Dissertation structure

26th October 2007

I've now finished designing a structure for my dissertation. There will be two main chapters, one on examples of music-generating computer programs and one on the techniques computer programmers can use to make such programs.

'The Math Behind the Music' is a good book, with lots of interesting examples of algorithmic composition, including theme variation, probabilities and musical dice. Musical Dice is a concept where there are several versions of every bar of a piece. When performing the piece, a die is rolled (traditionally) every bar, to select which version to play.

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Dissertation proposal

8th October 2007

I've handed in my dissertation proposal now. I'll be trying to answer the question 'To what extent can computers create music'. It's a fascinating subject that I should enjoy researching.

I've ordered a book called 'The Math Behind the Music' to get me started.

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The first week of the final year

28th September 2007

I've been back at uni for a week now, so I have a little more of an idea about what is expected of me this year:

For my Games Design module I'll be working in a group to design and ultimately produce a prototype for a game. The game will have to stand out among others to be worth a good mark, but as a group we are confident we can do this.

For Games Programming I'll be making example programs with DirectX. I'm not required to do anything totally unique here or magnificent, but I am told it will be a hard ride to get there.

For Sound Practice it appears I have to design and make interesting ways to interact with and dynamically produce sounds. I start of slowly though, by scoring a piece against a film clip.

I also have to build a final year project, which is worth 40 credits and write a dissertation that will compliment it.

Tags: games, 3D, programming, dissertation, MOSAIC

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