Conchord: An Application for Generating Musical Harmony by Navigating in a Perceptually Motivated Tonal Interval Space

We present Conchord, a system for real-time automatic generation of musical harmony through navigation in a novel 12-dimensional Tonal Interval Space. In this tonal space, Euclidean distances among multi-level pitch configurations equate with their perceptual proximity, and Euclidean distances of pitch configurations from the center of the space acts as an indicator of consonance. Building upon these attributes, users can intuitively and dynamically define a collection of chords based on their relation to a tonal center (or key) and their consonance level. Furthermore, two algorithmic strategies grounded in principles from function and root-motion harmonic theories generate chord progressions characteristic of Western tonal music.

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