Statistics-Based Music Generation Approach Considering Both Rhythm and Melody Coherence

This paper presents a music generation method which is an extension of a previously presented method that generates coherent melodies using a melodic coherence structure extracted from a template piece. This extension, which has been applied for generating bertso melodies, adds the generation of the rhythmic content of the melodies, for which a rhythmic coherence structure of the template piece is also created. To do so, a pattern discovery and ranking method is used to discover the rhythmically repeated segments that are interesting, and create a rhythmic coherence structure which can have several levels of nesting. Independent sampling processes have been developed for melodic and rhythmic content, using an adapted optimization method for sampling the rhythmic content of the new pieces. An evaluation process has been carried out to evaluate some of the generated pieces, considering on one hand how the listeners perceive them and on the other hand whether they share the features with bertso melodies. It has been concluded from this evaluation that the method is capable of generating good coherent bertso melodies.