Harmonizing music the Boltzmann way

Bellgard, M.I. and Tsang, C.P. (1999) Harmonizing music the Boltzmann way. In: Griffith, N. and Todd, P.M., (eds.) Musical Networks: Parallel Distributed Perception and Performance. MIT Press, United States of America, pp. 261-277.

Abstract

Music harmonization has long been recognized as a highly intellectual process. Musicologists have studied music pieces by great composers and formulated a number of symbolic rules. However, these rules usually form only a set of heuristics and may not be absolutely precise. In this paper, we demonstrate how to train a Boltzmann machine to capture these syntactic rules and use it to construct an effective Boltzmann machine (EBM) to harmonize some unseen pieces. We have also incorporated ways to apply absolute constraints to the completetion process. Our experiments demonstrate that using an EBM, 'good' harmonies can be non-deterministically synthesized along with a relative measure of their quality.

Item Type:	Book Chapter
Murdoch Affiliation(s):	School of Information Technology
Publisher:	MIT Press
Copyright:	1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
URI:	http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/17308

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