HARMONET: A Neural Net for Harmonizing Chorales in the Style of J. S. Bach

HARMONET, a system employing connectionist networks for music processing, is presented. After being trained on some dozen Bach chorales using error backpropagation, the system is capable of producing four-part chorales in the style of J.S. Bach, given a one-part melody. Our system solves a musical real-world problem on a performance level appropriate for musical practice. HARMONET's power is based on (a) a new coding scheme capturing musically relevant information and (b) the integration of backpropagation and symbolic algorithms in a hierarchical system, combining the advantages of both.