Abstract
Creative behavior is one of the most fascinating areas in intelligence. The development of specific styles is the most characteristic feature of creative behavior. All important creators, such as Picasso and Beethoven, have their own distinctive styles that even non-professional art lovers can easily recognize. Hence, in the present work, attempting to achieve cantus firmus composition and style development as well as inspired by the behavior of natural ants and the mechanism of ant colony optimization (ACO), this paper firstly proposes a meta-framework, called ants on multiple graphs (AntsOMG), mainly for roughly modeling creation activities and then presents an implementation derived from AntsOMG for composing cantus firmi, one of the essential genres in music. Although the mechanism in ACO is adopted for simulating ant behavior, AntsOMG is not designed as an optimization framework. Implementations can be built upon AntsOMG in order to automate creation behavior and realize autonomous development on different subjects in various disciplines. In particular, an implementation for composing cantus firmi is shown in this paper as a demonstration. Ants walk on multiple graphs to form certain trails that are composed of the interaction among the graph topology, the cost on edges, and the concentration of pheromone. The resultant graphs with the distribution of pheromone can be interpreted as a representation of cantus firmus style developed autonomously. Our obtained results indicate that the proposal has an intriguing effect, because significantly different styles may be autonomously developed from an identical initial configuration in separate runs, and cantus firmi of a certain style can be created in batch simply by using the corresponding outcome. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, the presented implementation is immediately applicable to the creation of cantus firmi and possibly other music genres with slight modifications. Second, AntsOMG, as a meta-framework, may be employed for other kinds of autonomous development with appropriate implementations.
Highlights
Our obtained results indicate that the proposal has an intriguing effect, because significantly different styles may be autonomously developed from an identical initial configuration in separate runs, and cantus firmi of a certain style can be created in batch by using the corresponding outcome
Based on personal experience for creation, we found inspiration from the collective intelligence of ant colonies, propose the framework of ants on multiple graphs (AntsOMG) as the computational model to simulate the multi-dimensional, multi-thinking aspects of the compositional process, and apply the framework to cantus firmus, which originated from the middle-ages and blossomed in the seventeenth-century counterpoint textbooks
While the primary goal of this study is to investigate the creation and intelligent behavior, cantus firmus composition and style development is selected as a showcase of the proposed framework, forming a secondary goal
Summary
Among the crucial goals in pursuing automation of creativity and intelligent behavior is music composition, of which the idea can be dated back for centuries [1], long before the development of modern computers composed of electronic components, such as vacuum tubes and transistors.The historical trajectory of the application of computer methodologies on music composition or generation can be traced via reviews and surveys in various related domains, such as evolutionaryElectronics 2020, 9, 1212; doi:10.3390/electronics9081212 www.mdpi.com/journal/electronicsElectronics 2020, 9, 1212 computation [2,3,4], computational intelligence and creativity [5,6,7], deep learning [8], and artificial intelligence [9,10,11,12]. Most of the studies in existence focus on the generation of musical sequences that consist of notes with little or no involvement of composers or music artists These studies, which originate from the engineering or computational aspects, usually belong to one of the following categories: (1) generating notes according to some rules or certain mathematical constructs; (2) using example data to train models to mimic a given music style or to compose as some target composer; and, (3) considering composition as an optimization task in which the objective function determines many important properties and characteristics of the creation. When composers are at work, their creative ideas can be extremely complicated and sophisticated, many music ideas are being developed simultaneously from mixed materials of various facets at different levels. These ideas influence each other, and overlap in the layers of interpretation. A compositional or personal style that is based on a certain time period or music genre becomes a subject that is even more rarely discussed
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