Automatic music generation

Back to the time of Pythagoras, music was numbers, therefore, perfection. Nowadays, numbers are mainly related to computers.

If you have a look at music theory books, you will see that music follows patterns. There are simple rules to produce a given scale, be it major, minor, harmonic, melodic, etc. There are also definitions of what a prelude is. When you say, "a blues in B", the band knows what to play. And so on.

So numbers and patterns used together allow to analyze music. Thus, it should be possible to generate music with a computer: get some numbers, use known patterns, put some randomness and there you go.

I am not a musician. I just play a little bit of classical/flamenco guitar. I have heard about software like "Band in a box" or Impro-visor which, as far as I know, do generate solos and/or play-back music on a given grid of chords.

The goal of this blog is to put together ideas on how to build a "Music Generator", that is a software which allows you to select a set of options (key, music style, etc.) and "composes" a piece of music. Ideally, one should be able to select to generate music "in the mood of" some musician (Mozart, Chuck Berry or Paco de Lucia).

So we will need to see the state of the art in music software, learn some music theory and start writing code ...

See you soon.