Abstract
The composition of most styles of music is governed by rules. The natural statement of these rules is declarative (“The highest and lowest notes in a piece must be separated by a consonant interval”) and non deterministic (“The base note of a key can be followed by any note in the key”). We show that by approaching the automation and analysis of composition as a knowledge representation task and formalising these rules in a suitable logical language, powerful and expressive intelligent composition tools can easily be built. This paper describes the use of answer set programming to construct an automated system that can compose both melodic and harmonic music, diagnose errors in human compositions and serve as a computer-aided composition tool. The use of a fully declarative language and an “off-the-shelf” reasoning engine allows the creation of tools which are significantly simpler, smaller and more flexible than those produced by existing approaches. It also combines harmonic and melodic composition in a single framework, which is a new feature in the growing area of algorithmic composition.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Chuang, J.: Mozart’s Musikalisches Würfelspiel (1995), http://sunsite.univie.ac.at/Mozart/dice/
Xenakis, I.: Formalized Music. Bloomington Press, Stuyvesant (1992)
Cope, D.: A Musical Learning Algorithm. Computer Music Journal 28(3), 12–27 (Fall, 2006)
Anders, T.: Composing Music by Composing Rules: Design and Usage of a Generic Music Constraint System. Ph.D thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast, Department of Music (2007)
Fux, J.: The Study of Counterpoint from Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum. W.W. Norton (1965, orig 1725)
Thakar, M.: Counterpoint. New Haven (1990)
Brothwell, A., Ffitch, J.: An Automatic Blues Band. In: Barknecht, F., Rumori, M. (eds.) 6th International Linux Audio Conference, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, LAC 2008, pp. 12–17 (March 2008)
Leach, J.L.: Algorithmic Composition and Musical Form. Ph.D thesis, University of Bath, School of Mathematical Sciences (1999)
Ebcioğlu, K.: An Expert System for Harmonization of Chorales in the Style of J.S. Bach. Ph.D thesis, State University of New York, Buffalo, Department of Computer Science (1986)
Rohrmeier, M.: Towards modelling harmonic movement in music: Analysing properties and dynamic aspects of pc set sequences in Bach’s chorales. Technical Report DCRR-004, Darwin College, University of Cambridge (2006)
Baral, C.: Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Declarative Problem Solving, 1st edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)
Gebser, M., Schaub, T., Thiele, S.: GrinGo: A New Grounder for Answer Set Programming. In: Baral, C., Brewka, G., Schlipf, J.S. (eds.) LPNMR 2007. LNCS, vol. 4483, pp. 266–271. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Syrjänen, T.: Lparse 1.0 User’s Manual. Helsinki University of Technology (2000)
Gebser, M., Kaufmann, B., Neumann, A., Schaub, T.: Conflict-Driven Answer Set Solving. In: Proceeding of IJCAI 2007, pp. 386–392 (2007)
Syrjänen, T., Niemelä, I.: The Smodels System. In: Codognet, P. (ed.) ICLP 2001. LNCS, vol. 2237. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Lierler, Y., Maratea, M.: Cmodels-2: SAT-based Answer Set Solver Enhanced to Non-tight Programs. In: Lifschitz, V., Niemelä, I. (eds.) LPNMR 2004. LNCS, vol. 2923, pp. 346–350. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Eiter, T., Leone, N., Mateis, C., Pfeifer, G., Scarcello, F.: The KR System dlv: Progress Report, Comparisons and Benchmarks. In: Cohn, A.G., Schubert, L., Shapiro, S.C. (eds.) KR 1998: Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, pp. 406–417. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1998)
Eiter, T., Faber, W., Leone, N., Pfeifer, G., Polleres, A.: The DLVK Planning System. In: Flesca, S., Greco, S., Leone, N., Ianni, G. (eds.) JELIA 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2424, pp. 541–544. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Lifschitz, V.: Answer set programming and plan generation. J. of Artificial Intelligence 138(1-2), 39–54 (2002)
Nogueira, M., Balduccini, M., Gelfond, M., Watson, R., Barry, M.: A A-Prolog Decision Support System for the Space Shuttle. In: Answer Set Programming: Towards Efficient and Scalable Knowledge Represenation and Reasoning. American Association for Artificial Intelligence Press, Stanford (March 2001)
Baral, C., Gelfond, M.: Reasoning agents in dynamic domains. In: Logic-based artificial intelligence, pp. 257–279. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2000)
Buccafurri, F., Caminiti, G.: A Social Semantics for Multi-agent Systems. In: Baral, C., Greco, G., Leone, N., Terracina, G. (eds.) LPNMR 2005. LNCS, vol. 3662, pp. 317–329. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Cliffe, O., De Vos, M., Padget, J.: Specifying and Analysing Agent-based Social Institutions using Answer Set Programming. In: Boissier, O., Padget, J., Dignum, V., Lindemann, G., Matson, E., Ossowski, S., Sichman, J., Vazquez-Salceda, J. (eds.) ANIREM 2005 and OOOP 2005. LNCS, vol. 3913, pp. 99–113. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Polleres, A.: Semantic Web Languages and Semantic Web Services as Application Areas for Answer Set Programming. In: Brewka, G., Niemelä, I., Schaub, T., Truszczyński, M. (eds.) Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Answer Set Programming and Constraints, Internationales Begegnungs- und Forschungszentrum für Informatik (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings, vol. 05171 (2005)
Ruffolo, M., Leone, N., Manna, M., Saccà, D., Zavatto, A.: Exploiting ASP for Semantic Information Extraction. In: De Vos, M., Provetti, A. (eds.) Answer Set Programming. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 142, CEUR-WS.org (2005)
Brain, M., Crick, T., De Vos, M., Fitch, J.: TOAST: Applying Answer Set Programming to Superoptimisation. In: International Conference on Logic Programming. LNCS. Springer, Heidelberg (August 2006)
Grell, S., Schaub, T., Selbig, J.: Modelling biological networks by action languages via answer set programming. In: Etalle, S., Truszczyński, M. (eds.) ICLP 2006. LNCS, vol. 4079, pp. 285–299. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Konczak, K.: Voting Theory in Answer Set Programming. In: Fink, M., Tompits, H., Woltran, S. (eds.) Proceedings of the Twentieth Workshop on Logic Programming (WLP 2006). Number INFSYS RR-1843-06-02, Technical Report Series, pp. 45–53. Technische Universität Wien (2006)
Erdem, E., Lifschitz, V., Nakhleh, L., Ringe, D.: Reconstructing the Evolutionary History of Indo-European Languages Using Answer Set Programming. In: Dahl, V., Wadler, P. (eds.) PADL 2003. LNCS, vol. 2562, pp. 160–176. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Boulanger, R. (ed.): The Csound Book. MIT Press, Cambridge (2000)
Bel, B.: Migrating Musical Concepts: An Overview of the Bol Processor. Computer Music Journal 22(2), 56–64 (1998)
Brain, M., De Vos, M., Satoh, K.: Smodels-ie: Improving the Cache Utilisation of Smodels. In: Costantini, S., Watson, R. (eds.) Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Answer Set Programming, pp. 309–314 (2007)
Ward, J., Schlipf, S.: Answer set programming with clause learning. In: Lifschitz, V., Niemelä, I. (eds.) LPNMR 2004. LNCS, vol. 2923, pp. 302–313. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Brain, M., Gebser, M., Pührer, J., Schaub, T., Tompits, H., Woltran, S.: “That is illogical captain!” – The Debugging Support Tool spock for Answer-Set Programs: System Description. In: De Vos, M., Schaub, T. (eds.) Proceedings of the Workshop on Software Engineering for Answer Set Programming (SEA 2007), pp. 71–85 (2007)
Endrich, A.: Building Musical Relationships. In: Preparation (manuscript, 2008)
Brain, M., De Vos, M.: Implementing OCLP as a Front End for Answer Set Solvers: From Theory to Practice. In: Proceedings of Answer Set Programming: Advances in Theory and Implementation (ASP 2003), Ceur-WS (September 2003)
Boenn, G.: Composing Rhythms Based Upon Farey Sequences. In: Digital Music Research Network Conference (July 2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Boenn, G., Brain, M., De Vos, M., ffitch, J. (2008). Automatic Composition of Melodic and Harmonic Music by Answer Set Programming. In: Garcia de la Banda, M., Pontelli, E. (eds) Logic Programming. ICLP 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5366. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89982-2_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89982-2_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-89981-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-89982-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)