Process

We started working on music generation for the interactive programming project. For that project we designed a program that would generate a melody randomly given a chord progression. When this project finished, we were interested in pursuing it further, so we decided to do an extension of this for the final project.

Although we initially expected to start from where we had ended the interactive programming project, we ended up beginning from scratch. While discussing how to pursue music generation from what we had already done, we realized that we wanted algorithmic music generation, not just randomly created music. To implement something like this, we decided to rely heavily on the music21 library that we had used some in the interactive programming program.

With a general idea for the project decided, we were able to refine the concept more with help from the class. The most useful feedback we received was to focus on a target audience. Up until that point, we had not considered the audience specifically, only what we wanted to create. Following receiving this feedback, we were able to refine the user interface to be more friendly for a target audience of people with knowledge of music and computer science.

Authors and Contributors

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