Background

Music has been around for a very long time, and, like many things, it has continuously evolved. This opens up many different genres, styles, and structures. Historically, these musical works were created by compositional masters – people with a talent for musical understanding and creativity. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the use of computers to compose musical works. This field of algorithmic music composition is huge with applications ranging from attempting to compose masterpiece works in the style of a particular composer to allowing music to be composed/generated real-time for DJ settings.

Algorithmic music composition opens up a range of interesting applications. The speed at which an algorithm can compose a work allows for a degree of interactivity where music can be generated while the user varies algorithmic parameters or in some cases even real-time as the algorithm executes. Another interesting advantage of algorithmic composition is that it makes some really diverse approaches possible – things like composing music mathematically, based on other existing music, and based on constrained random generation to name a few.

Authors and Contributors

We are Joseph Lee and Bryan Werth, two freshman at Olin College of Engineering.