Modelling Musical Structures

• Authors: Detlev Zimmermann
• Venue: Constraints
• Year: 2001

Modelling musical structures is a research field prominent among mathematiciansand computer scientists as well as musicologists, psychomusicologistsand musicians. Constraint programming has been proved to be ahighly appropriate technique in this field. For the task of automatedmusic composition, in particular, constraints have been shownto describe composition principles in a declarative, natural,and, above all, efficient way since music composition knowledgeis in fact a collection of conditions rather than a sort of cookery-book.Unfortunately, many approaches stress the technicalaspects of applying constraints and do not think about the concreterole of constraints, i.e. about what music really should be.In general, the composer as an artist is more concerned aboutwhat he wants to say through his music than with theoretically(or socially or psychologically) established rules. This meansthat automated music composition needs practical goals in orderto make sense. The role of those goals as well as musical constraintsand constraint technologies that help to realize the goals areto be shown in this article. As a modelling example the systemCOPPELIA is introduced. It generates music on the basis of thestructures, goals, and contents of given multimedia presentations.In this relatively young field of constraint application thatdoes not supply such ideal, well-defined and closed sets of conditionsas technical applications do, we find it very important to alsopresent general thoughts about the sense of our application,about the development of composition constraints and the conditionsunder which these constraints work effectively.