Dynamic Musical Orchestration Using Genetic Algorithms and a Spectro-Temporal Description of Musical Instruments

In this paper a computational approach of musical orchestration is presented. We consider orchestration as the search of relevant sound combinations within large instruments sample databases. The working environment is Orchidee an evolutionary orchestration algorithm that allows a constrained multiobjective search towards a target timbre, in which several perceptual dimensions are jointly optimized. Up until now, Orchidee was bounded to “time-blind” features, by the use of averaged descriptors over the whole spectrum. We introduce a new instrumental model based on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) which allows to represent the complete spectro-temporal structure. We then present the results of the integration of our model and improvement that it brings to the existing system.

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