Malakai: Music That Adapts to the Shape of Emotions
This addresses the need for accessible, emotion-responsive music creation tools for users of varying skill levels, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ML models and procedural algorithms.
The authors tackled the problem of creating dynamic music that adapts to emotions in real-time for interactive experiences, resulting in a tool called Malakai that enables users to compose, listen to, remix, and share such music.
The advent of ML music models such as Google Magenta's MusicVAE now allow us to extract and replicate compositional features from otherwise complex datasets. These models allow computational composers to parameterize abstract variables such as style and mood. By leveraging these models and combining them with procedural algorithms from the last few decades, it is possible to create a dynamic song that composes music in real-time to accompany interactive experiences. Malakai is a tool that helps users of varying skill levels create, listen to, remix and share such dynamic songs. Using Malakai, a Composer can create a dynamic song that can be interacted with by a Listener