Creating Music and Texts with Flow Machines

This chapter introduces the vision and the technical challenges of the Flow Machines project. Flow Machines aim at fostering creativity in artistic domains such as music and literature. We first observe that typically, great artists do not output just single artefacts but develop novel, individual styles. Style mirrors an individual’s uniqueness; style makes an artist's work recognised and recognisable. Artists develop their own style after prolonged periods of imitation and exploration of the style of others. We envision style exploration as the application of existing styles, considered as texture, to arbitrary constraints, considered as structure. The goal of Flow Machines is to assist this process by allowing users to explicitly manipulate styles as computational objects. During interactions with Flow Machines, the user can create artefacts (melodies, texts, orchestrations) by combining styles with arbitrary constraints. Style exploration under user-defined constraints raises complex sequence generation issues that were addressed and solved for the most part during the first half of the project. We illustrate the potential of these techniques for style exploration with three examples.