Nao Tokui and Hitoshi Iba
Department of Information and Communication Engineering,
Graduate School of Engineering, University of Tokyo
Abstract
Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC), i.e., Evolutionary Computation
whose fitness function is provided by a user his/herself, has been applied
to esthetic areas, such as art, design and music. We cannot necessarily
define fitness functions explicitly in these areas. With IEC, however,
we can embed the user's implicit preference into the optimization system.
This paper describes a new approach to music composition, more precisely
the composition of rhythms, by means of IEC. The main feature of our method
is to combine Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Genetic Programming (GP). In
our system, GA individuals represent short pieces of rhythmic patterns,
while GP individuals express how these patterns are arranged in terms of
their functions. Both populations are evolved interactively through the
user's evaluation. The integration of interactive GA and GP makes it possible
to search for musical structures effectively in the vast search space.
In this paper, we show how successfully our proposed method can generate
attractive musical rhythms. The effectiveness of our system is demonstrated
by the evolved rhythm phrases, which are available from our web site as
sound files.
WWW: http://www.miv.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~tokui/research/iec-music/