A modular system yielding jazz-style arrangement for a given melody and sequence of chord names

Abstract

There are many music systems available on the market, such as ones for automatic arrangement of music pieces given as note sequences for solo piano into a piano score in a specific style. Those systems, however, are usually designed to generate music by concatenating existing arrangement patterns, so we cannot expect those systems to meet user requirements. This paper proposes a system that arranges a given set of melody expressed as a note sequence and a chord name sequence into a piano score in modern jazz style based on so-called ‘‘jazz theory.’’ The system is implemented in the classical theory of harmony and arrangement techniques described in jazz theory in a modular system. Proposed is a system that gives arrangement by integrating several modules according to structure of input music and user requirements. Performance of the proposed system is evaluated by comparing results given by the proposed system with those given by popular arrangement systems available on the market. Experimental results show that arrangement by the proposed system is significantly superior to arrangement by other systems available on the market. [Work supported by Academic Frontier Project, Doshisha Univ., Knowledge Cluster Project, MEXT, Grant-in Aid for Scientific Research (No. 16700154), MEXT, HRC, Ryukoku Univ.]