Generating Targeted rhythmic Exercises for Music Students with Constraint Satisfaction Programming

Generating technical exercises for various levels of playing ability is important for any instrument method book. Writing exercises by hand can be quite tedious, and severely limits the number of exercises which could be created. This is particularly apparent when we consider computer music tutoring systems, which could benefit from a library of thousands of exercises. This library could be used to pick material which addresses the specific weaknesses of students, or to ensure that the student always practices new material while working on sight-reading. We therefore turn to computer-assisted composition to generate these technical drills. This is a challenging problem for which the use of constraints provides an elegant solution.