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Modelling Musical Structures

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Abstract

Modelling musical structures is a research field prominent among mathematicians and computer scientists as well as musicologists, psychomusicologists and musicians. Constraint programming has been proved to be a highly appropriate technique in this field. For the task of automated music composition, in particular, constraints have been shown to describe composition principles in a declarative, natural, and, above all, efficient way since music composition knowledge is in fact a collection of conditions rather than a sort of cookery-book.

Unfortunately, many approaches stress the technical aspects of applying constraints and do not think about the concrete role of constraints, i.e. about what music really should be. In general, the composer as an artist is more concerned about what he wants to say through his music than with theoretically (or socially or psychologically) established rules. This means that automated music composition needs practical goals in order to make sense. The role of those goals as well as musical constraints and constraint technologies that help to realize the goals are to be shown in this article. As a modelling example the system COPPELIA is introduced. It generates music on the basis of the structures, goals, and contents of given multimedia presentations. In this relatively young field of constraint application that does not supply such ideal, well-defined and closed sets of conditions as technical applications do, we find it very important to also present general thoughts about the sense of our application, about the development of composition constraints and the conditions under which these constraints work effectively.

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  1. Private Fern-Fachhochschule Darmstadt, Postfach 10 01 64, D-64201, Darmstadt, Germany

    Detlev Zimmermann

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  1. Detlev Zimmermann
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Zimmermann, D. Modelling Musical Structures. Constraints 6, 53–83 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009801426289

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