Computer music

My Kickstarter for a book on melody has launched! Check it out!

It will run for 3 weeks, until October 14th.

How often have you been sitting there thinking: “Oh my gosh! I wish I had some new sea chantey melodies to play on an instrument and/or write lyrics to!”  Probably more times than you care to count, eh?

Well, fear no more!  The sea chantey melody generator is finally here!  That’s right; in less than a second, the sea chantey melody generator will generate hundreds of sea chantey melodies for you, filled with those catchy memorable sea chantey melody patterns.

Here is a sample of 100 sea chantey melodies as generated by the generator.  Feel free to write lyrics for them and add them to your collection of sea chantey goodness.

The sea chantey melody generator is available for just 5 easy payments of $50,000.

Seriously, though, I’ve been working on getting my melody generator to compose in “styles” and sea-chantey-style was my first experiment.  I look forward to trying some other styles.  As usual, the melody generator is restricted to 8-bar melodies in 4/4 time, a restriction I still haven’t programmed my way out of, but trying to get the generator to work with styles has been a more interesting endeavor recently.

I still have a lot of work to do on this thing, but I mainly wanted to show that my melody generation algorithm now works fast enough to make this web-based version possible:

For the past couple days, I’ve been working on getting my melody generation program to output MIDI files so I wouldn’t have to convert them manually from a text file, which takes an annoying amount of time. And… I’ve done it, haha! So now I can tell my program… hey, I want 1,000 melodies, go. And it spits it all out over the course of a couple minutes. So here are 1,000 short little MIDI files my program wrote just a few moments ago, in a zip file:

Zip file with 1000 computer generated melodies

Some notes:

1. – Again, the program is currently restricted to 8-bar melodies in 4/4 time, and must start with the I chord and end on the tonic.

2. – For the sake of a little variety, I set the tempo to be a random BPM between 80 and 150, and the key signature to be random between A major and D major (it starts in C major then just shifts all notes up or down).

3. – There is one small bug you might hear in some of the melodies: the bass notes are shifted offbeat. I’m workin’ on it. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to happen often.

Here are yet more computer generated melodies from my in-development automatic melody generator. I have made a lot of changes to the algorithm since I posted the last set of examples, but I’m not sure how much you can actually hear. Still more work to be done… anyway, here are 12 more melodies…

Computer generated melodies

Enjoy!

I’ll probably spend another week on the main algorithms, then I’ll start trying to add more diverse capabilities, like different time and key signatures.

Even though I’ve still got plenty of work to do on my automatic melody generator, it’s at the point now where I’m finding it quite addicting. Here are a bunch of melodies it came up with today (I think there are 12 altogether, each stated twice):

Computer generated melodies

Again, I don’t think the melodies sound super fantastic by themselves, but there are definitely some surprisingly good phrases, in my opinion.

Some notes:

1 – Again, it’s still limited to 8-bar melodies in 4/4 time in C major that begin and end on the I chord and can only use the basic triads. I still have algorithmic changes to make before I start expanding its abilities in this area. (For the audio above, I transposed it up a step to D major; sounded just a bit better to me.)

2 – The program is “creating” its own “melodic knowledge” and, as you might hear, the biggest problem this creates is that it likes to write large melodic leaps every now and then, which can sound funky. It didn’t do this before because it based its melodies on observations, and large melodic leaps like that would never (or rarely) be observed. So I’m going to have to hardwire an interval limit into the algorithm, perhaps letting the user set it.

3 – In the last two melodies, I gave the program the ability to use to 16th notes. You don’t hear them in the other melodies because the program wasn’t allowed to use them, but it’s an easy ability to give the program. Triplets, on the other hand, will be tricky… I guess I’ll have to figure out those at some point. Meh… that can come much later…

4 – The program outputs a text file with note values and accompanying chords; it doesn’t actually output the sound you hear in the MP3 … I had to manually enter the info into Overture 4 and use Garritan Personal Orchestra to create the actual sounds.