Trancendence: An artificial life approach to the synthesis of music

This thesis presents results from an exploratory project to construct a system that automatically composes electronic music. The premise of the project is that composition can be viewed as a search problem with good songs being maxima in the search space of all possible songs. A Genetic Algorithm was used to compose short melodic samples and an agent-based system would mix the samples together. To aid the user in rating, a statistical approach was also used to rate the samples. Several live tests were conducted with human users and the preliminary results from those tests suggest that the statistical approach does work. 1 This thesis was submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Science degree in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems from the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences within the University of Sussex at Brighton, U.K.