A Bayesian Network for Real-Time Musical Accompaniment

We describe a computer system that provides a real-time musical accompaniment for a live soloist in a piece of non-improvised music for soloist and accompaniment. A Bayesian network is developed that represents the joint distribution on the times at which the solo and accompaniment notes are played, relating the two parts through a layer of hidden variables. The network is first constructed using the rhythmic information contained in the musical score. The network is then trained to capture the musical interpretations of the soloist and accompanist in an off-line rehearsal phase. During live accompaniment the learned distribution of the network is combined with a real-time analysis of the soloist's acoustic signal, performed with a hidden Markov model, to generate a musically principled accompaniment that respects all available sources of knowledge. A live demonstration will be provided.