A hybrid computational intelligence approach for automatic music composition

The use of computers in the production of artifacts has drawn the attention of both artists and computer scientists. Among the different art disciplines, music is one of the arts that most benefited from the use of computers. There are many works which demonstrate the great synergy between these two fields. In this paper we will focus on a specific music composition problem: the figured bass problem, in which we have to automatically generate a 4 voice piece of music, starting from an input the bass line. To solve this problem we use a hybrid strategy, in which different metaheuristics cooperate to find high quality solutions. The cooperation is controlled by means of the combination of fuzzy control and knowledge obtained through Data Mining. As will be shown in the experimental results section, this hybrid strategy is capable of finding musical solutions with an acceptable quality and never discordant which, according to experts, are sound and adhere to scholastic rule. © 2011 IEEE.