UC Berkeley

We define the problem of machine improvisation of music with formal specifications. In this problem, one seeks to create a random improvisation of a given reference melody that however satisfies a "specification" encoding constraints that the generated melody must satisfy. We consider the scenario of generating a monophonic Jazz melody (solo) on a given song harmonization. The music is encoded symbolically, with the improviser generating a sequence of note symbols comprising pairs of pitches (frequencies) and discrete durations. Our approach can be decomposed roughly into two phases: a generalization phase, that learns from a training sequence (e.g., obtained from a human) an automaton generating similar sequences, and a supervision phase that enforces a specification on the generated sequence, imposing constraints on the music in both the pitch and rhythmic domains. The supervision uses a measure adapted from Normalized Compression Distances (NCD) to estimate the divergence between generated melodies and the training melody and employs strategies to bound this divergence. An empirical evaluation is presented on a sample set of Jazz music. Copyright: