Institute for Creative Technologies

Poster: Reid Swanson

ICT, Co-author - Andrew Gordon, ICT, Elaine Chew, Harvard University

Date: Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Location: Stanford University
Host: Creative Intelligent Systems, AAAI Spring Symposium Series

Music and language are two human activities that fit well
with a traditional notion of creativity and are particularly
suited to computational exploration. In this paper we will
argue for the necessity of syntactic processing in musical
applications. Unsupervised methods offer uniquely
interesting approaches to supporting creativity. We will
demonstrate using the Constituent Context Model that
syntactic structure of musical melodies can be learned
automatically without annotated training data. Using a
corpus built from the Well Tempered Clavier by Bach we
describe a simple classification experiment that shows the
relative quality of the induced parse trees for musical
melodies.