Solver-aided chorale composition

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Composing music is hard: if you hit the keys on a piano randomly, chances are, it won’t sound great. A music theory aims to distill a musical syntax such that a syntactically correct composition will not sound “wrong.” Under this view, composition becomes a constraint satisfaction problem: given a background theory, find a sequence of composition actions that does not violate the theory’s syntax.

To illustrate this view, here’s a toy project called Choco that I built for composing music in the style of Baroque four-part chorales. It was originally developed as a course project for CS 292C - Computer Aided Reasoning for Software, and was motivated by my earlier memory of doing four-part voice leading in a music theory class. I felt at that time that the rules of four-part harmony were rigid enough, and the process mechanical enough, that it would be possible to automate the process of composing a chorale. Choco is my attempt at doing just that.

Music on Junrui Liu

Solver-aided chorale composition

Introduction