Automatic arrangement for ensemble music by estimating playing difficulty on instrumentalists

Abstract

Since arrangement of sheet music for orchestral ensemble requires a certain musical knowledge and expertise, amateur orchestral musicians often have difficulties when arranging. An automatic arrangement method was proposed by employing Eigenmusic which is a set of eigenvector for many music excerpts, in order to evaluate the similarity among phrases. The difficulty in playing the arranged sheet music, however, was not evaluated; so, whether players feel difficulties on playing, or playability, was out of discussion. This study proposes a method to evaluate the degree how easy to play the phrases on sheet music. This method generates phrases for woodwind instruments using a MIDI database of backing phrases. Each musical phrases selected from the database are allocated to instrumentalists. In turn, the phrases’ playability is evaluated based on instrumentalist’s individual ratings for playing features such as cross-fingering, jumping notes, and so forth. Finally, phrases evaluated as the easiest are conjoined in each instrumentalist. We conducted an experiment to investigate the playability of generated sheet music by musician’s rating. Experimental results showed that the evaluation of playability by proposed method is effective so that proposed method generates easier phrases to play than our previous method.