An Argument-based Creative Assistant for Harmonic Blending
This addresses the challenge for musicologists in defining salient features and assessing invented harmonic spaces, though it is incremental as it builds on existing conceptual blending methods.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating and enhancing harmonic innovation in computational creativity by proposing a creative tool that allows music experts to specify arguments over transition properties, which are then used in an idiom-blending process to produce novel harmonic spaces.
Conceptual blending is a powerful tool for computational creativity where, for example, the properties of two harmonic spaces may be combined in a consistent manner to produce a novel harmonic space. However, deciding about the importance of property features in the input spaces and evaluating the results of conceptual blending is a nontrivial task. In the specific case of musical harmony, defining the salient features of chord transitions and evaluating invented harmonic spaces requires deep musicological background knowledge. In this paper, we propose a creative tool that helps musicologists to evaluate and to enhance harmonic innovation. This tool allows a music expert to specify arguments over given transition properties. These arguments are then considered by the system when defining combinations of features in an idiom-blending process. A music expert can assess whether the new harmonic idiom makes musicological sense and re-adjust the arguments (selection of features) to explore alternative blends that can potentially produce better harmonic spaces. We conclude with a discussion of future work that would further automate the harmonisation process.