Genetic Approaches for Evolving Form in Musical Composition

An approach of evolving form in musical composition is presented here. The use of genetic algorithms in musical composition is not new but rather energetically active field of research and experiments. However, the approach presented within this paper differs from other genetic composition approaches in twofold. First, samples of musical ideas (one note or more) and not individual MIDI notes are used. Second, the focus of the approach is on evolving musical form rather than attempting to compose musical sequences. In addition, the selection process is guided by the responses of the users within an interactive process. In this paper, a genetic algorithm (evolving musical form algorithm (EMFA)) is presented in details followed by a brief examination of a sketched prototype of the system.