Generation of musical patterns through operads
This provides a novel algebraic framework for generative music, addressing composition challenges in computational music, but it is incremental as it builds on existing operad theory.
The paper tackles the problem of generating polyphonic musical phrases by introducing multi-patterns as an algebraic abstraction, enabling composition into longer phrases through operads, with applications in random generative music algorithms.
We introduce the notion of multi-pattern, a combinatorial abstraction of polyphonic musical phrases. The interest of this approach lies in the fact that this offers a way to compose two multi-patterns in order to produce a longer one. This dives musical phrases into an algebraic context since the set of multi-patterns has the structure of an operad; operads being structures offering a formalization of the notion of operators and their compositions. Seeing musical phrases as operators allows us to perform computations on phrases and admits applications in generative music: given a set of short patterns, we propose various algorithms to randomly generate a new and longer phrase inspired by the inputted patterns.