Shaping the Music Perception of an Automatic Music Composition: An Empirical Approach for Modelling Music Expressiveness

Abstract

Expressiveness is an important aspect of a music composition. It becomes fundamental in an automatic music composition process, a domain where the Artificial Intelligent Systems have shown great potential and interest. The research presented in this paper describes an empirical approach to give expressiveness to a tonal melody generated by computers, considering both the symbolic music text and the relationships among the sounds of the musical text. The method adapts the musical expressive character to the musical text on the base of the “harmonic function” carried by every single musical chord. The article is intended to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method by applying it to some (tonal) musical pieces written in the 18th and 19th century. Future improvements of the method are discussed briefly at the end of the paper.