From: dtg001@dunix.drake.edu (Soli Deo Gloria)
Subject: Re: Information Needed:  Computers and analysis
Organization: Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, USA
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 11:21:18 GMT

Just forwarding this to News as requested.  :)

From mkc@media.mit.edu Thu Oct  8 20:45:40 1992
From: Michael Casey <mkc@media.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 92 21:46:35 -0400
To: dtg001@dunix.drake.edu (Soli Deo Gloria)
Subject: Re: Information Needed:  Computers and Analysis

In article <1992Oct7.203515.3347@dunix.drake.edu>,
dtg001@dunix.drake.edu (Soli Deo Gloria) writes:

|> I am a student of Church Music, nearing completion of my studies,
|> and am interested in pursuing the use of computers in the
|> _analysis_ of previously written music, and the "composition" of
|> new music based upon rules found in the music analyzed.
|> (rest of text deleted)

You may want to consider David Cope's book "Computers and Musical Style"
which is an anthology of the author's work on this very subject;
analysis/synthesis of musical composition. The book includes (LISP)
source code to significant parts o
f his EMI system (Experiments in Musical Intelligence). For the
non-technical reader there is a brief introduction to LISP programming.
There are numerous examples of programs applied to examples from musical
literature, (Bach, Mozart, Schu
bert, Stravinsky and many others). The program produces an analysis of
the regularities in two or more pieces of the same style and uses these
as "signiatures" to generate a new piece in that style. Cope's
methodology is derived from a mixture of classical AI (or rule based)
models and linguistic grammars (Augmented Transition Network).

The results are interesting and can be remarkable. But I have to add
that there are significant problems with the methods. The system seems
good at capturing very local
phenomena, (such as cadence formulae), but is ill-conditioned for
capturing more global
aspects of musical structure (such as melodic coherence, harmonic
interest, &c). These
problems have been acknowledged by the author but I think they are
unsolvable in the
current working paradigm.

There has been much other work on computer-generated and
computer-mediated composition. If anyone is interested I can post a
comprehensive bibliography. Below is a tiny selection that in no way
represents the scope of the available research:-

Ames, C. 1982, Protocol: Motivation, Design and Production of a
Composition for Solo Piano, "Interface", 2:11.

Cope, D., 1987, An Expert System for Computer-Assisted Composition,
"Computer Music Journal", 11:4.

Cope, D., 1991, "Computers and Musical Style", Madison: A-R Editions.

Loy, G., 1985, Programming with Computers- a Survey of Some
Compositional Formalisms and Music Programming Languages, in "Current
Directions in Computer Music Research", ed. Max Matthews and John
Pierce, Cambridge: MIT press.

Loy, G. 1991, Connectionism and Musiconomy, "International Computer
Music Conference Proceedings", CMA, 1991.

Schottstaedt, W., 1989, Automatic Counterpoint, in "Current Directions
in Computer Music Research", ed. Max Matthews and John Pierce,
Cambridge: MIT press.

Todd, P., 1989, A Connectionist Approach to Algorithmic Composition,
"Computer Music Journal", 13:4.

Winograd, T., 1968, Linguistics and the Computer Analysis of Tonal
Harmony, "Journal of Music Theory", 12:1


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(p.s. please forward this to the news group as My version of xrn is not
working properly)

Xref: sparky comp.music:4756 rec.music.synth:16464