Amanda Crawford's Honours website = Introduction

Amanda Crawford's Honours website

* Introduction *

- Background -

- Methods -

- Results -
[Analysis]
[MIDI]

- Conclusions -

- Downloads -
[Documents]
[Source code]

- Logbook -

- References -

Introduction

MIDI files are in abundance on the Internet, but little software exists out there that will tell you anything interesting about the musical content of these files. This thesis aims to create some software to do this, that will provide information on things such as tempo, key and bars of music. Information such as this is useful to musicians who may want to translate the MIDI files into a form that they can play on instruments themselves, or even to create sheet music that is a close representation of the music contained in the MIDI file.

Generating new music is also a focus for this project. The main aim is to create new music on a computer, either through using programmed music theory, or read in the information from existing music. Guitar chords are chosen as the basis for generating new music in this project because the author is familiar with guitar chords and the associated theory. With an earlier focus on MIDI files, the music file format for the generated music is also MIDI.

To determine how successful the analysis software is, a significant genre of music should be analysed by the software. In this case, the blues genre was chosen because blues music is really the first genre learnt by novice guitarists. However, the generation model should also be applied several times, to ensure that a variety of compositions can be generated by the model.

This project uses the functional programming paradigm, and is implemented in Haskell and the Haskore Computer Music System. See the references page for more information.

Project aims

Music analysis
- To implement some software that will output useful musical information from a given MIDI file.
- To analyse a significant genre of music using the software mentioned above.
Music generation
- To create original music using a computer, by physically coding the music.
- To develop an algorithm to generate new compositions, using music theory and guitar chords.
- Apply the algorithm a number of times to generate a variety of compositions.