Markov Composer – Using machine learning and a Markov chain to compose music

http://zx.rs/3/Markov-Composer---Using-machine-learning-and-a-Markov-chain-to-compose-music/

by vsakos • 11 years ago

68 31 11 years ago

kyberias• 11 years ago

Comment to the maintainer of that page: Don't put dark blue on black background. It's very hard to see and read.

krick2• 11 years ago

Dark blue on black? Either something has changer over the last 2 hours, or there's something with your display, because what I'm seeing is light grey on dark grey and it's quite readable.

k-mcgrady• 11 years ago

The main content for me is black background/white(light grey) text. However the code samples contain blue on black and so does some content in the left sidebar.

317070• 11 years ago

Well, another clear argument that 'composing music' is far more complicated than sequencing notes.

TheOtherHobbes2• 11 years ago

Indeed.

Music is not a list of numbers produced by a statistical distribution.

Structural relationships are global, not local. Markov chains are nowhere near smart enough to model that.

birdsbolt3• 11 years ago

It depends on how exactly global they are, a Markov chain with a large enough degree could be good enough. There's nothing stopping anyone in using additional global features when they're conditioning in the chain. But, that would require quite a bit of data to construct a good distribution. Nonetheless, Markov chains can be pretty smart.

Or, if you want to get even better performance, you can use conditional random fields with exactly the same global features, one has an advantage of not needing so much data because the distribution being modelled isn't a joint one + CRFs are excellent with custom features (features are observed variables and their distribution is implicitly present in the conditional distribution). Disadvantage would be that you couldn't as easily generate the sequence of notes (chords) because the model isn't generative (unlike Markov chains), but one can use Gibbs sampling (combined with CRFs) to search over the space of probable sequences.

Or, some nicely trained convnets could get you even closer to the brain of the composer :D

raverbashing3• 11 years ago

Absolutely

Just transitioning from one note to the other means nothing. Transitioning from a C->E can occur in different situations, and can be "right" or "wrong"

The most pressing issue I see is that it is memoryless (Markov process), also the apparent lack of musical knowledge of the author.

spankalee3• 11 years ago

This is why I track current chord as part of the current state, so that you're more likely to generate notes in key and chord tones. The problem was then chromatic runs and leading to upcoming chord changes, so I tracked the beat, hoping to get diatonic notes on strong beats and push the leading notes to weak beats.

That makes thing a quite a bit better, but it's still a memoryless process which makes any apparent motifs only generate if you happen to walk a similar path through the STM.

There are a lot more bits of state that you can track in the analysis to fix things up, but at some point you need to build up a memory of what you've generated and use that to modify the STM on the fly.

jakejake• 11 years ago

I feel like a computer can come up with interesting sounds and possibly works similarly to a musician in the initial brainstorming phase of creating music. The difference is that the musician can recognize when one particular phrase is interesting and then run with that idea. Whereas the computer is not able to make the distinction and so it just goes on sounding like so much musical gibberish.

IndianAstronaut• 11 years ago

I have heard that some musicians use WolframTones for some inspiration.

http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/

joeyspn• 11 years ago

It would be better to feed this tool with hooktheory's API containing common chord progressions...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9394176

hliyan• 11 years ago

Will it be possible to write a filter on top of this to eliminate invalid/dissonant outputs based on music theory -- e.g. key signature, beat, harmonics etc?

Edit: Try listening to only the first bar of each sample at the bottom of the page. It almost sounds like the beginning of a proper composition. The only problem is that subsequent bars don't match. Fix that and I think there's something great here.

musicalentropy• 11 years ago

What about rhythm ?

krick2• 11 years ago

Nothing really new here, I've seen multiple blog posts about how to do exactly that thing using exactly the same methods. But everything I've seen so far is pretty primitive, as it constructs a sequence of tones completely disregarding the rhythmic part, and I'm not sure if treating them as separate things is actually good idea: at least it deserves another blog post exploring if there should be some relationship between tone and rhythm in order to produce good results.

spacemanmatt• 11 years ago

Can't tell if parent is being sly or cautiously serious. Yes: Note envelope (attack/sustain/decay) and other attributes could and should be included in chained phrases.

robhack• 11 years ago

Cool, it reminds me of one of my very old project : http://robhub.github.io/melogen/@auto.swf (sorry, Flash, I know..) However, it would require tons more work to make something interesting.

spankalee3• 11 years ago

I got really into Markov chains a while back and started analyzing Jazz solos, but using the current harmony, beat, and note durations as part of the state I tracked.

The results were promising I thought. Though I wouldn't call them great (they tend towards long, fast runs that are statistically possible, but unrealistic), they do have a touch of musicality that simpler analysis often lack.

It's all old Lisp code that I need to resurrect, but I found an .mp3 of generated blues solo from an analysis of Coltrane's Blue Train: https://soundcloud.com/spankalee/markov-blue-train

jeffwass• 11 years ago

How'd you source the training data from Blue Train? Ie, did you manually transcribe the solos, or if done automatically what software did you use?

spankalee3• 11 years ago

I forget exactly where, but I had just googled for transcriptions of Coltrane, Parker, etc. solos. This was one of the best I found.

I think getting that high-quality data is one of the hardest things about this problem if you're interested in Jazz.

moogly• 11 years ago

That's cool! Sounds a bit like Allan Holdsworth! But that's a given since "they tend towards long, fast runs that are statistically possible, but unrealistic" is a description that fits some of his solos quite well :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNAHOcZ6NxM&feature=youtu.be...

alok-g• 11 years ago

Does someone know of a source of MIDI files that could be used for training music composition algorithms (without violating copyrights)?

raverbashing3• 11 years ago

http://www.mutopiaproject.org/

te• 11 years ago

http://www.piano-e-competition.com/midi_2009.asp

DanBC• 11 years ago

It's a shame that DarwinTunes didn't become more popular.

http://darwintunes.org/

I'd like to see something that combines user-guided evolution and markov chains.

rcpt• 11 years ago

Algorithmic composition is a decently-sized field. Here's a textbook:

http://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Composition-Paradigms-Auto...

And some more examples:

http://algorithmiccomposition.org/

Markov Composer – Using machine learning and a Markov chain to compose music

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