A funny thing happened on the way to the formula: Algorithmic composition for musical theatre

Algorithmic composition methods must prove themselves within real world musical contexts to more firmly solidify their adoption in musical practice. The present project is an automatic composing program trained on a corpus of musical theatre songs to create novel material, directly generating a scored leadsheet of vocal melody and chords. The program can also output based upon phonetic analysis of user-provided lyrics. Chance to undertake the research arose from a television documentary funded by Sky Arts, which considered the question of whether current generation computationally creative methods could devise a new musical theatre work (the research described here provides but one strand within that project). Allied with the documentary, the resultant musical had a two week West End run in London and was itself broadcast in full; evaluation of the project included both Author’s Name (“Anonymous” in initial submission) 2 Computer Music Journal October 3, 2016 design feedback from a musical theatre composer team, and critical feedback from audiences and media coverage. The research challenges of the real world context are discussed, with respect to the compromises necessary to get such a project to the stage.