> Music composers have long been attracted by the idea of an automated tool for music generation, that is able to aid them in their day-to-day compositional process.<p>As an amateur composer I find this notion ridiculous. I love my DAW and all of its capabilities, but the compositional process itself is something I’ll never want to automate. That would defeat the purpose. I’d give long odds that if many composers were surveyed the percentage who want software to generate musical ideas for them would be close to zero.
TidalCycles (<a href="https://tidalcycles.org/" rel="nofollow">https://tidalcycles.org/</a>) is indeed written in Haskell - another take on 'music as language', though through live coding<p>Full disclosure: I'm the author of Glicol (<a href="https://glicol.org/" rel="nofollow">https://glicol.org/</a>)
Not related to this paper but you may find the Solresol constructed language interesting:<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol</a>
i think the big blind spot most research like this has is that they focus on the abstractions on music- "harmony" in particular. music becomes so much more interesting when you realize the practicalities of the instruments, coordination of musicians and circumstances of listening etc drive the music as much as anything. the music encodes all this. notice how different genres have different instruments, different band sizes, different performance customs, different societal status, different harmony, melody, rhythm, texture etc? focusing on harmony is fun, but its over analyzed because its math bait
I have a strong hunch that music has a profound emotional effect because we can use the same kind of signal decomposition to encode both emotionality and musicality. Of course, I have no evidence for my claim.
I'm working at a research lab where we are designing assistive musical instruments for disabled musicians. A couple projects involve building guitars that can be played one handed, and have all the chord changes handled by transposing/muting the 6 open notes played on the strings according to guitar tabs which encode finger positions on the fret board.<p>I don't play guitar, and all my background music theory is primarily keyboard based. Learning about guitar tabs, and finger positions and techniques, a lot about guitar based music makes much more sense, and if you even just look at the data behind guitar tabs is smells like it's own dialect of music.<p>Take a look at this chords database. <a href="https://tombatossals.github.io/react-chords/" rel="nofollow">https://tombatossals.github.io/react-chords/</a><p>That's just chords, the dynamics are a whole other dimension of expression and communication. A single note with expressive control can communicate a lot.<p>And then rhythm! A game my daughter and I play is to name that song just by clapping it.<p>The bandwidth of communication in music is really quite astounding.<p>It is the original virtual reality.