MorpheuS: generating structured music with constrained patterns and tension
This addresses the problem of musical coherence in automatic music generation, particularly for game or film music contexts, though it is incremental as it builds on existing pattern detection and optimization methods.
The MorpheuS system tackles the challenge of generating music with long-term structure by creating polyphonic pieces with specified tension profiles and repeated patterns, using optimization to assign pitches to a template rhythm while constraining patterns, and it has been performed live in concerts.
Automatic music generation systems have gained in popularity and sophistication as advances in cloud computing have enabled large-scale complex computations such as deep models and optimization algorithms on personal devices. Yet, they still face an important challenge, that of long-term structure, which is key to conveying a sense of musical coherence. We present the MorpheuS music generation system designed to tackle this problem. MorpheuS' novel framework has the ability to generate polyphonic pieces with a given tension profile and long- and short-term repeated pattern structures. A mathematical model for tonal tension quantifies the tension profile and state-of-the-art pattern detection algorithms extract repeated patterns in a template piece. An efficient optimization metaheuristic, variable neighborhood search, generates music by assigning pitches that best fit the prescribed tension profile to the template rhythm while hard constraining long-term structure through the detected patterns. This ability to generate affective music with specific tension profile and long-term structure is particularly useful in a game or film music context. Music generated by the MorpheuS system has been performed live in concerts.