Making Music with Algorithms: A Case-Study System

AI Methods in Algorithmic Composition: A Comprehensive Survey

“…However, Markov chains generated from a corpus of pre-existing compositions captured just local statistical similarities, and their limitations soon became apparent (Moorer, 1972): low-n Markov chains produced strange, unmusical compositions that wandered aimlessly, while high-n ones essentially rehashed musical segments from the corpus and were also very computationally expensive to train. Because of this, Markov chains came to be seen as a source of raw material, instead of a method to truly compose music in an automated way, except for some specialized tasks such as rhythm selection (McAlpine et al, 1999). Therefore, while research interest in Markov chains receded in subsequent years as these limitations became apparent and other methods were developed, they remained popular among composers.…”

“…the work of Burraston and Edmonds (2005 put was more properly considered as raw material to be edited by hand. CAMUS was later generalized, using a Markov chain to determine the note durations and three-dimensional versions of the Game of Life and Crystalline Growths (McAlpine et al, 1999).…”

At the Crossroads of Evolutionary Computation and Music: Self-Programming Synthesizers, Swarm Orchestras and the Origins of Melody

“…Evolutionary Computation Volume 12, Number 2 Cellular Automata Music (Millen, 1990), a CA Music Workstation (Hunt et al, 1991), CAMUS (Miranda, 1993), MOE (Degazio, 1999), GenDash (Waschka, 1999), CAMUS 3D (McAlpine et al, 1999), Vox Populi (Manzolli et al, 1999), Synthetic Harmonies (Bilotta et al, 2000), Living Melodies (Dahlstedt and Nordahl, 2001) and Genophone (Mandelis, 2001), to cite but a few. Before GA became fashionable in musical applications, a number of people tried to explore the emergent behaviour of CA to generate musical compositions.…”

On the evolution of music in a society of self-taught digital creatures

“…Due to limitations of space, we will briefly introduce only the role of the Game of life (Gardner 1971) in the generative process. More information on CAMUS and references to related work can be obtained in a paper that appeared in the Computer Music Journal (McAlpine et al 1999) or in this author's book Composing music with computers (Miranda 2001a). The Game of life is an attempt to model a colony of simple virtual organisms.…”