Music Composition with Interactive Evolutionary Computation

Nao Tokui.

Department of Information and Communication Engineering,

Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.

e-mail: tokui@miv.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Prof. Hitoshi Iba.

Department of Frontier Informatics, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences,

The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.

e-mail: iba@miv.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Abstract

The interactive evolutionary computation (IEC), i.e., an evolutionary computation whose fitness function is provided by users, has been applied to aesthetic areas, such as art, design and music. We cannot always define fitness functions explicitly in these areas. With IEC, however, the user's implicit preference can be embedded into the optimization system.

This paper describes a new approach to the music composition, more precisely the composition of rhythms, by means of IEC. The main feature of our method is to combine genetic algorithms (GA) and genetic programming (GP). In our system, GA individuals represent short pieces of rhythmic patterns, while GP individuals express how these patterns are arranged in terms of their functions. Both populations are evolved interactively through the user's evaluation. The integration of interactive GA and GP makes it possible to search for musical structures effectively in the vast search space. In this paper, we describe how our proposed method generates attractive musical rhythms successfully.

1. Introduction

We have been developing an interactive system called “”CONGA” (the abbreviation of “composition in genetic approach” and also the name of an African percussion), which enables users to evolve rhythmic patterns with an evolutionary computation technique [10].

In general, evolutionary computation (EC) has been applied to a wide range of musical problems, such as musical cognition and sound synthesis. Among such problems, composition is one of the most typical and challenging tasks. Music composition can be taken as a combinatorial optimization in the infinite combination of melodies, harmonies and rhythms. Thus it is natural to apply computational search technique as typified by EC. Up to now, Genetic algorithms (GA) [4] and genetic programming (GP) [9] have been successfully applied to the music composition tasks [1]. For example, Biles used GA to generate jazz solo [7] and Johanson and Poli generated melodies by means of GP [2].

When these EC techniques are EC is applied to the musical composition, there are three main topics to be considered [1], i.e., the search domain, the genetic representation, and the fitness evaluation.

The first topic is the search domain. As mentioned earlier, the musical composition is a combinatorial optimization problem, whose search spaceion is basically unlimited, because there is an infinite possible combinationscombination of melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. It is not reasonable to expect computers to compose music like Mozart or Beethoven from scratch. Therefore, the composition must be guided by some constraints.

The next is the genetic code representation of music. Generally speaking, the effectiveness of EC search largely depends on how to represent a target task as a genetic code.

The third topic of consideration is the fitness evaluation of EC individuals. Because music is evaluated based on the ambiguous human subjectivity, it is difficult to define the explicit fitness function in the musical composition.

From these points of view, we can describe our system as follows:Considering these requests, we establish our system “CONGA”. The salient features of our system are as follows.

1. Search domain: Musical rhythm patterns

The purpose of our system is to generate short (i.e. from 4 to 16 measures) rhythm patterns. However we only deal with a particular subset of rhythms. In the context of this paper, the word rhythm means a sequence of notes and rests which occur on natural pulse subdivisions of a beat. This is a reasonable reduction of the search domain for the application of ECs.

There are a few related works. in this direction. For instance, Horowitz used an IEC to learn user’s criteria for evaluating rhythms and succeeded in producing one-measure long rhythm patterns [3]. To produce longer andmusically more interesting phrases musically, we have adopted unique genetic representation described later.

2. Genetic representation: Combination of genetic algorithm and genetic programming.

Our system maintains both GA and GP populations and represents music with the combination of individuals in both populations. GA individuals represent short pieces of rhythmic patterns, while GP individuals express how these patterns are arranged in terms of their functions. In this way, we try to express a musical structure, such as a repetition, with the structural expression of GP and evolve longer and more complicated rhythm phrases without spreading the search space.

3. Fitness function: User him-/herself.

A common problem in applying EC to an aesthetic task is the difficulty of setting up a formal fitness function to evaluate the individuals. Interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) avoids this problem by making human users evaluate each individual empirically (see Fig. 1) [6].

In a conventional EC, each individual is evaluated by a given fitness function. On the other hand, a user evaluates individuals by him-/herself in an IEC. Therefore IEC can make EC techniques applicable to subjective optimization problems without explicitly modelling the human subjective evaluation systems.

Some researches mentioned before adopted this IEC technique for the musical composition [2,3,7]. In a similar way, our system adopts the idea of interactive evolution, which enables to generate music on the basis of user’s criteria. We also implement the mechanisms to keep the consistency of human subjective evaluation and the diversity of the genotypes.

However there is a major obstacle toThe common difficulty in the practical use of IEC. It is the human fatigue. Since a user must cooperatework with a tireless computer andto evaluate each individual in every generation, he/she may well feel pain. It is the biggest remaining problem to reduce the psychological burden on users. In order to deal withthis problem, we proposethis, we adopt an evaluation assistance by means of learning user’s criteria with a neural networkmethod.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows.

Section 2 shows the overall image of our. Section 3 introduces the genetic representation. Section 4 describes user’s operation and the evaluation assistance by the system. Section 5 shows result of several experiments, followed by some conclusion in Section 6.

Fig. 1 The framework of the interactive evolutionary computation.

2. System architecture

Fig. 2 gives an overview of our system. This system has been developed in Windows PC environment with Borland C++ Builder. The system is based on MIDI (Musical Instruments Digital Interface) specification. MIDI is a standard interface between electronic instruments, such as synthesizers and samplers, and computers. Maximum MIDI library [12] is used to embed MIDI compatibility.

As shown in Fig. 2, GA and GP populations are displayed as grids on windows respectively. Each cell of the grid is associated with an individual in the correspondent population. A user can listen to any individual by clicking the corresponding cells and give a fitness value.

Fig. 3 shows the system architecture. Note that the genetic representation in our system contains two populations. These are a population of GA individuals, which represent short musical phrases, and a population of GP individuals, which represent how these short patterns are arranged in time line. The alternation of generations occurs in these two populations based on the user’s given fitness values.

We have adopted “Multi-field user interface” [13], in which children are displayed in a separate window instead of replacing their parents. In addition, we have implemented the migration among these windows. Users can migrate an individual from a display window to another by the drag and drop operation. This feature provides more flexible breeding and richer diversity of genotypes by the effects similar with the island model in GA or GP [5].

Moreover, we have enhanced the system flexibility by introducing user-defined parameters. Users can set the population sizes, input the length of generated rhythm patterns and select timbres for composition. Users also can set “swing rate” of the rhythms. These features make generated phrases much more musicalcontribute to generating much more musical phrases. Besides this, the system can synchronize with other MIDI sequencers, by sending MIDI time clock (MTC). If you program a melody with that external sequencer in advance, you can evolve rhythm patterns, which sounds good with the melody.

Fig. 2 The “CONGA” system overview.

Fig. 3 The system architecture.

3. Genetic Representation

3.1. Genetic Algorithm

GA individuals represent short (i.e., a half or one measure long) multi-voice rhythm patterns. Genotype of GA individuals is a two-dimensional array of integers (Fig. 4). Users can set the number of timbres, the length of the phrase represented by an individual and the unit time resolution, e.g., eighthnote or sixteenth note. Thus user’sthe settings determineuser’s setting determines the size of arrays. Each element of the array stands for the strength of the beat. This value is called velocity in the terminology of MIDI. VThe velocity is a number between 0 and 127, because the velocityit is represented as 4 bit datas.

We have introduced genetic operations listed in Table.1, assumconsidering that they are musically meaningful operations.

Fig. 4 An example of GA individual.

Fig. 5 An example of GP individual.

Table.1 Genetic operation in GA.

Type	Name	Description
Crossover	One-point crossover	Apply standard crossover
	Part exchange	Exchange parts for timbres among individuals
Mutation	Random	Apply standard mutation
	Rotation	Rotate the loci a random amount
	Reverse	Play the loci in reverse order.
	Timbre exchange	Exchange timbres within an individual

3.2. Genetic Programming

GP individuals represent how the above-mentioned GA individuals are arranged in a time series. Terminal nodes are ID numbers of GA individuals in GA population. Non-terminal nodes are functions, such as repetition and reverse operations (see Fig. 5, and Table.2).

We used normal genetic operations in GP, e.g. sub-tree crossover and mutation. The GP engine is based on a revised version of LGPC (Linear GP system in C) [11]. Linear GP is one of GP notations, in which program structures are represented as a linear array. We have been developing LGPC as a general-purpose Linear GP system and showed its advantage in the speed and low memory consumption [11]. Adopting faster system can lighten the burden imposed on users by shortening waiting time. AndMoreover the feature of the low memory consumption is effectivdesirable especially in common PCs, which usually have restricted memory.

Although the above representation enables structuring music sequence, the length of the expressed music may be problematic, i.e., the generated music can be all different in their lengths. To deal with this problem, we imposed a constraint upon the length in the following way.

A new generation is bred with a larger population size. Then, GP individuals are selected based on the length of the phrase represented by the individual. Only individuals with lengths close to the length given by the user in advance will be selected and displayed to the user.

In this way, we can keep the constant length of rhythm patterns represented by diverse GP individuals without increasing individuals, which a user must face to evaluate.

Table.2 Functions in GP.

Name	Arity	Description
Sequence	2	Play NODE1 and NODE2 consecutively.
Repetition	2	Repeat NODE1 till the lengths of both child nodes become the same.
Concatenation	2	Play the first half of child NODE1 and the second half of NODE2 consecutively.
Reverse	1	Play NODE1 in reverse.
Random	0	Play randomly selected node.

4. Evaluation and Alternation of generations

4.1. User’s operation

As we have stated repeatedly, the EC selection isdone based on the user's evaluation. Users listen to each individual and increase or decrease the fitness value from the standard valueaccordingly. The fitness values are normalized in the population and used in the selection process. Selection method isWe use the proportional selection with the elite strategy.

As we all know, hHuman subjective evaluation is very ambiguous and inconsistent in general. This tendency can be strong, especially when thetarget of evaluation target is music. Unlike images, music cannot be displayed in parallel. Therefore our evaluation can be largely affected by the presentation order.

To compensate for this defect, we set standard individuals for the evaluation. To be concrete, if an individual is copied and reproduced in a generation, its fitness value is also copied from the value, which user gavea user has given in the previous generation. The user can evaluate other individuals more consistently with the reference to this standard fitness value.

In this system, GA and GP populations are evolved separately. At first, the alternation of generations is done in GA population several times. Next, GP individuals with evolved GA gene codes are evaluated and the generation of GP population proceeds. If the user wants better GA individuals for the GP evaluation, he/she can go back to the GA population and evolve it again. This cycle continues until the satisfyinga satisfactory rhythm evolves.

4.2. Evaluation Assistance

During the above-mentioned operations, the psychological burden is not negligible to the user who listens and gives a fitness value to each individual. This load on users is a common problem in the IEC technique. We canmay reduce the population size or the number of generations in order to lighten the burden. However, the effectiveness of EC search maycan be degraded for that. Thus, we need to solve this dilemma for the more widespread applications of IEC.

For this purpose, we have implemented the automatic evaluationan evaluation assistance method. When generations proceed, we breed a larger number of individuals. Subsequently, each individual is evaluated automatically with the technique shown below.

1. The reduction in GP individuals based on the length of represented rhythm (see section 3.2).

2. The reduction in GA population by learning human subjective function with a neural network (NN)

By these reduction schemes, we can display only individuals that mark high fitness. Accordingly, users are expected to evaluate a relatively smaller number of individuals.

The basic idea of NN learning is from [2,8]. For a start, we have implemented the “reduction" in GP based on length of represented rhythm (see section 3.2). In a similar way, we tried to learn human subjective fitness function with a neural network (NN) to realize such reduction in GA population. We have used a three-layered network (Fig. 6) for the purpose of learning the human fitness function. It learns through the back-propagation how a user gives the fitness value of GA individuals given by a user through the back-propagationto a GA individual. Inputs to the NN are elements of array GA genotype and the output is the estimated fitness value of the phrases represented by the array. By individual, which the array represents. By showing the user individuals only get high score with this NNchoosing only individuals with a high NN output score, we can reduce the number of GA individuals that a user must face to evaluate.

Fig. 6 The diagram of neural network learninga neural network, which learns user's criteria.

5. Experimental Results

We have conducted several evaluation experiments so far. In the first experiment, several subjects with different musical background and preferences and preferences used our system to make rhythms whatever they want. Most of the subjects found our system performance satisfactory. In another experiment, we gave users the theme for the composition, such as "rhythms sound like rock’n’roll songs", and then make them compose music by our system. Fig. 7 shows a typical “rock’n’roll rhythm” generated in this experiment.

A couple of generated rhythms in these experiments are available from our web site as sound files (URL: http://www.miv.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~tokui/research/iec-music/), some of which will be presented at GA2000.

OnAs for the reduction of GA population by NN, we got a positive feedback from users. It seems to increase the probability of breeding a new generation, which reflects the user’s evaluation in the previous generation. To evaluate the effectiveness of this method, however, we need to analyse experimental results more quantitatively, which will be our future work.

Fig. 7 A typical generated rhythm phrase generated by “○○CONGA”.

6. Conclusion

In this paper, we described our research on the interactive musical composition system. The system enables the interaction between EC and human beings. We have shown that the system can generate musical phrases successfully by combining GA and GP.

Our research has two important aspects. One is to study the basic IEC scheme and another is to develop a novel tool for the music composition. From the first point view, we should make more quantitative analysis on the effectiveness of the whole system, especially for the evaluation assistance by the neural network. For this purpose, we plan to conduct some psychological experiments with many test subjects. In another respect, we should expand the musicality of generated phrases. At the beginning, we will embed a mechanism to handle melodies to the system.

Recent research topics, such as humanized technology or KANSEI engineering {}, show that now it's timThere is a move to revise the relationship between computers and human beings in proportion as computers become indispensable in our everyday life. We believe the IEC will be one of the most important techniques to embed human subjectivity to the searching ability of computers. In addition, the progress in the computer technology will bring us a novel way to make music more enjoyable and exciting. We hope our research can contribute to this stream.

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