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Generating Tonal Counterpoint Using Reinforcement Learning

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Neural Information Processing (ICONIP 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5863))

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Abstract

This report discusses the behavioural learning properties of a musical agent learning to generate a two-part counterpoint using SARSA, one of the on-policy temporal difference learning approaches. The policy was learned using hand-crafted rules describing the desired characteristics of generated two-part counterpoints. The rules acted as comments about the generated music from a critic. The musical agent would amend its policy based on these comments. In our approach, each episode was a complete 32-bar two-part counterpoint. Form and other contexts (such as chordal context) were incorporated into the system via the critic’s rules and the usage of context dependent Q-tables. In this approach the behaviours could be easily varied by amending the critic’s rules and the contexts. We provide the details of the proposed approach and sample results, as well as discuss further research.

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Phon-Amnuaisuk, S. (2009). Generating Tonal Counterpoint Using Reinforcement Learning. In: Leung, C.S., Lee, M., Chan, J.H. (eds) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5863. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10677-4_66

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10677-4_66

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10676-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10677-4

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