Musikalisches Domino-spiel

http://x.i-dat.org/~bb/moco/readmore.html

Musikalisches Domino-spiel
Inspired by David Cope's research (Computer and Musical Style [1991] and Experiments in Musical Intelligence [1996]), I decided to explore the educational potential of some of his main ideas. Music can be an important tool for teaching abstract principles, mathematics, algorithms, etc. Also, at the same time any music and musical system raises many issues about the music itself, as a structure, and as a system. This page is based on a very similar page that I created in 1997 to implement an easy interactive way to compose versions of Mozart's 'Musikalisches Wrfelspiel'. This page is currently being used by mathematics teachers all over the world as a playful example of probability. In this document, I can only very briefly touch on the surface of some of the ideas that David Cope sets out in his books. Nevertheless, I believe that the simple example I have created makes these ideas much more accessible than Cope has made them, even with the help of the software that is distributed on CD-rom with Experiments in Musical Intelligence.

Sections in this page:

Introduction to Cope's work About musical grammars The educational domino-game Creativity The goal of automatic composition References

Introduction to Cope's work

David Cope has been working on his systems for automatic music composition since the 1980s. He has developed some of the most sophisticated algorithms for analysis and re-composition of classical music. These sophisticated algorithms are part of a software system that he has named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence). The basic assumption in all his work, is the following, as exemplified in his assertion:The genius of great composers, I believe, lies not in inventing previously unimagined music but in their ability to effectively reorder and refine what already exists.

(Cope 1996:1) This assumption, together with Cope's outspoken preference for a certain few classical composers, explains a great deal of his work. It has shaped the whole design of his composition software and it has determined the compositions that he has created with it.

Style
Cope's main research interest in automatic composition, has to do with the formalization of style. His software tries to recreate music in a way that the style survives the re-composition process. Cope maintains a fairly strict concept of style; a 'baroque' style has too wide a meaning for him, he sees stylistic consistency only within certain groups of compositions of a certain composer. For this purpose, Cope has developed the following general algorithm to process example composition, and create new compositions by recombining elements from the examples:

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(A general algorithm for EMI, Cope 1996, page 27)

Analysis
EMI's analysis component tries to apply a functional analysis to the harmonic progression of the given music. This functional analysis is called the SPEAC system. (Statement, Preparation, Extension, Antecedent, Consequent). The reason behind this functional analysis, is to be able to recombine music in ways that the recombined harmony follows the same logical rules as the original harmonic progression.

Pattern matching
Cope has found out, through experiments with music-students, that an important part of a composers style, is communicated through what he calls 'signatures': certain melodic and/or rhythmic patterns that are found in several of the composer's pieces. EMI tries to maintain those signatures by first detecting them through pattern matching. (searching for occurrences of similar patterns that are found in different pieces.) Then, those signatures which are detected are protected from recomposition and thus remain intact.

Deconstruction
The music is then cut up in little pieces (usually measures), and stored in a database to be retrieved on harmonic function. (lexicons)

Reconstruction
Then, a new composition is created by following the rules of a simple ATN (augmented transition network, see below), that define possible transitions over harmonic functions. Two further constraints apply here: (1) voice-leading rules, melodies have certain preferences for what pitches they may be followed up with; and (2) cadences have a backward-working constraint on the normally forward looking ATN; they require

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to be preceded by a correct harmonic introduction, while their position in the resulting composition is fixed.

About musical grammars

In 1973, in his lecture series 'The Unanswered Question' at Harvard University, Leonard Bernstein explained his interest in Chomsky's generative grammars, and proposed a new research field that he named 'musico-linguistics'. He was very optimistic about the possibilities to gain insight in music in ways similar to the insights given by linguistics research into syntax and semantics. Musical grammars have been implemented for melodic, rythmic and harmonic generation. Some systems have been self-learning, but it is also common to use existing knowledge on musical rules and formalize it into a generative grammar (Steedman). Generative grammars for language have very complex rules to account for issues such as tense and singular/plural agreement. Musical grammars can be much simpler, but to be effective they need to take into account the harmonic and melodic layered structure of music. EMI uses an Augmented Transition Network (ATN) for logical ordering of the music it generates. According to Cope, this implementation is very powerful in structuring the compositions, anticipating cadences, and generating logical musical sentences of appropriate length. In the simpler version of his software, called SARA, that is distributed with the book Experiments in Musical Intelligence, the generative grammar takes the form of a simple finite state transition network (FSTN), using the same SPEAC analysis, but only defining incipients, cadences, and filling up the space in between incipient and cadence with rules like a b -> c (a level-2 markov chain using SPEAC analysis), and a flexible voiceleading constraint that prefers voice leadings similar to the original music. If this sounds complicated, a short look at the domino-game and the explanation below will demonstrate that this system is actually extremely simple and effective.

The educational domino-game

This page allows the user to test EMI's ATN and voice-leading rules on a musical lexicon made up of measures taken from Mozart sonatas and some taken from Scott Joplin's rags. For the sake of simplicity, there is only one possible musical phrase structure: a two times eight bar phrase, with the first sub-phrase ending on a half-cadence, and the second one on a full-cadence. The user can select any bar in any place, the only restrictions being the choice of the half- and full-cadence, and (not implemented) the limited choice of qualified 'incipient' phrases at the beginning of sub-phrases. (To make the page agree better with Cope's system, and Mozarts Sonatas, the two sub-phrases should be the same except for the cadences) By clicking on a bar, the user can browse through all the options. It is possible to create sonatas that follow Cope's rules by looking at the SPEAC rules above the bar, and choose follow-up bars that give the correct SPEAC transitions. Then, as a second constraint, one should try to give a 'best-possible-match' between the start notes of the next bar and the voice-leading-preference of the previous one. This voiceleading-preference is shown underneath the arrow just after each bar. The advantages of this game, compared with Cope's SARA system, are numerous. By manually implementing the rules instead of depending on the 'black-box' that SARA is towards the user, it becomes much more understandable what is going on. Also, by introducing the possibility of wrong choices, one can explore by ear the difference between good and bad choices and anything in between, and in that way develop a deeper understanding for the music.

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Just as the Musikalisches Wrfelspiel is being used to teach the mathematics of probability, this page could be used to explain transition network and musical phrase structure. This is quite an easy level of understanding, for which there is no actual musical understanding required. On a higher level, for musicstudents, the page can be a helpful tool for exploring the SPEAC system and to explore the rules for voiceleading, as explained above.

Creativity
The EMI-system, impressive as it is, does not even begin to explore some of the most interesting possibilities offered by the underlying theory. This is not meant to be critical of David Cope, whose great achievements in the artificial intelligence of music and automatic composition were only possible through his dedication to the very clear goal of reproducing style in automatic compositions. These interesting possibilities are to be found in the new creative paradigms that can benefit from the system, by using the system, or the theory behind the system, in ways that it was not intended to be used. Some creative fields that can benefit from the EMI-system, its theory and its algorithms, are: (1) real-time generation, (2) fully automatic generation, and (3) collaborative generation.

Real-time generation
The system could probably easily be adapted to support real-time on stage composition. The workings of analysis and composition of EMI, as developed to imitate styles of classical composition, seems very suitable to imitate the style of jazz soloists. The combination of ATN for structuring and positioning of general (melodic) material, with the maintenance of well-positioned protected signatures, is very similar to exactly the way jazz-improvisation is generally taught to aspiring soloists.

Fully automatic generation

When it comes to the aesthetics of automatic composition, the EMI algorithms can add interesting structure, content, tradition, and thereby meaning to otherwise empty or un-interpretable noises. This does not mean that I suggest searching for 'classical' aesthetics in process-music: process-music (generative art) has an aesthetics of its own. Nevertheless, for human listeners it is easier to interpret music that relates to the human cultural background. Generative Art can have the beauty of a complete freedom of all contingencies and limitations of the individual. (As John Cage remarked :- a music by mankind, not just a man).

Collaborative generation
Another way to eliminate the contingencies and limitations of the individual, and to explore the beauty of the multitude, mankind as a whole, the interconnected subject, is to create methods of collaborative creativity. With a system that can reduce the decision making process to choices of elements in databases, it is feasible to come to interesting results with very simple means.

The goal of automatic composition

A dream
David Cope had a dream about automatic composition. (Quote). I can't help but be somewhat pessimistic about the future of automatic composition, and cannot easily identify with the ideals implied by Cope's dream. Although the naivety of replicating style by re-ordering existing material of a composer has a charm on its own, there is very little aesthetic interest to be found here, except in the algorithm and

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understanding itself. Cope's idea that 'The genius of great composers, I believe, lies not in inventing previously unimagined music but in their ability to effectively reorder and refine what already exists', may be the main problem here. It seems obvious that, even though at the surface the resulting music might be explained to be just recombinations of existing material, what these composers were doing, was quite something different to what this software is doing. These composers had a story to tell, they had musical ideas which stretched beyond the idea of 'lets put this bar after that one'.

Practical issues
Although, aesthetically speaking, I see little future for the form of automatic composition that Cope promotes, there clearly must be a future for his (and similar) software systems that aid composers, and particularly arrangers. Although nobody is waiting for the explosion of masses of new empty music (similar to modern pop music) that can now be created with a 3 button interface, there is certainly a market for affordable original arrangements for community big-bands, brass-bands, all over the world. The writing of such arrangements is not very demanding on the creative side, and much of the manual labour involved should be automated up to a point where each band can create their own arrangements. This would make the meetings of such bands much more interesting, and it would allow for more arrangements to be automatically tailored to the members of the band.

References
Back to the 'Compose' page David Cope Compose your own Musikalisches Wrfelspiel Zsofi Ruttkay's page on the educational aspect of Mozart's Musikalisches Wrfelspiel Cope, David (1991), Computers and Musical Style, Madison, Wisconsin; A-R Editions Cope, David (1996), Experiments in Musical Intelligence, Madison, Wisconsin; A-R Editions Bernstein, L (1973), The Unanswered Question, Harvard Univ. Press

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