FreshJam: Suggesting Continuations of Melodic Fragments in a Specific Style

Imagine that a budding composer suffers from writer’s block partway through devising a melody. A system called FreshJam is demonstrated, which offers a solution to this problem in the form of an interactive composition assistant; an algorithm that analyzes the notes composed so far, makes a comparison with an indexed corpus of existing music, and suggests a possible next note by choosing randomly among continuations of matched melody fragments. We provide a demonstration of FreshJam as an aid in stylistic composition, and of its potential to be more iterative than existing composition assistants such as PG Music’s Band in a Box or Microsoft’s Songsmith. There are many algorithms that, with one button click, generate entire melodies or passages of music in the style of another composer or period (Conklin and Witten 1995; Cope 2005; Pearce and Wiggins 2007). These one-click algorithms can be used to test theories of musical style, but are of little honest use to students of stylistic composition. This seems unfortunate, as some of the algorithms work by generating one note/chord at a time, and so are eminently suited to form the basis of a system for interactive music composition. Below we describe such a system, called FreshJam, in which users are able to request continuations to melodic fragments in a specific style. Compared with other models for compositional continuation (Cope 1997; Maxwell et al. 2012), the principles behind FreshJam are simple and few, and there is an argument for considering and evaluating simpler models before developing more complex alternatives. The term FreshJam refers to the piano-roll, web-based interface in which users compose a melody, and the term composition assistant refers to the functionality by which the user can request a continuation for their melody fragment (see www.projectfreshjam.com for a video demonstration). Figure 1 shows a schematic for the composition assistant. At the start of the flow diagram, the user has composed a fragment of n melody notes. Unsure how to proceed, they request a continuation from the composition assistant. If the user has not already selected a composer/style for the source of continuations, they are prompted to do so at this Copyright c © 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. FreshJam! State transition tables (user"s choice)! Melody of!