John Foster Undergraduate Dissertation 2015/16

Write me a hit record

Supervised by M.Stannett

Abstract

Those with a musical ear and sufficient knowledge can easily identify the composer of a new piece of music by picking up on certain attributes that it shares with works familiar to the listener. This project aims to reverse this process and use attributes common to a particular genre to create new pieces of music that are similar to those given. The system will be developed mostly with folk music as it is the author's preference and area of expertise; however, the program should be robust enough to cope with many different genres.

Over the years, there have been many attempts to automate the process of music composition. Many different techniques have been applied to solve the problem, including statistical models and genetic algorithms, but this project focuses on pattern recognition and recombining short phrases of music to form a new piece