Automatic Genre-Dependent Composition using Answer Set Programming

(Long paper)

Keywords: Automatic Composition, Answer Set Programming, Harmony theory, Logic Programming, Declarative Rule Languages.

Harmonic music composition adheres to declarative rules and has, hence, become more and more subject to automation techniques. Specifically, Answer Set Programming (ASP), a declarative framework for problem solving, has been successfully used in recent attempts to compose music based on either a certain genre or a composing technique. However, the composition based on the combination of both has not been supported so far. This paper introduces chasp, an approach that considers the problem of automatic music composition from a more general perspective. More specifically, chasp creates simple accompanying pieces of different genres. To accomplish this ASP is used to solve the problem of chord progressions, based on the rules proposed by the theory of harmony. This results into a harmonic sequence that eventually provides the basis for the creation of simple musical pieces by applying genre-specific templates, through an additional imperative control framework.