The tertiary student project of Nuwan Senaratna from University of Colombo won the gold at NBQSA 2006, surpassing 78 entries that included those from the University of Moratuwa, the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology and the Informatics Institute of Technology. As a result, it was selected to represent Sri Lanka in the same category at APICTA (Asia Pacific ICT Awards) 2006 in Taipa, Macao which consisted of 18 entries from 15 countries, including tech-giants like Australia, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The British Computer Society Sri Lanka Section who sponsored this event is proud to announce that this project became Sri Lanka’s first ever gold at APICTA.
Automatic Music Composition (AMC) is a “hot field” in computer science. In addition to being one of the fastest growing areas in Artificial Intelligence (AI), it has enormous commercial potential. Entertainment companies such as Sony, Disney and Phillips have invested billions into developing AMC applications. Naturally, a wide range of approaches and techniques have been explored in attempts to build AMC systems. Of these, emergent-computing techniques have proved very promising. However, most attempts have tended to use a single, centralized emergent technique for the entire AMC process. This has many drawbacks.
APICTA winning tertiary student project of Nuwan Senaratna proposed a solution to these drawbacks in the form of a tree-like structure made up of several interacting emergent systems. He calls this “A Tree of Interacting Emergent Systems” or TIES. TIES is a context-independent framework, applicable to many applications, including AMC. Nuwan Senaratna demonstrated the latter by using it to implement the product, AMCTIES (An application capable of Automatic Music Composition using a Tree of Interacting Emergent Systems).
AMCTIES defines a TIES framework for musical composition. Musical entities are represented as emergent entities. These are generated by emergent systems known as generators. Low-level emergent entities are used to generate high-level emergent entities, and hence form a tree of emergent systems. For example, Motifs and Rhythm are used to generate Phrases. TIES allows for complex interactions between its emergent systems and implements several additional design components in order to facilitate this. The TIES framework is independent of the implementation of the actual generators. The idea is to design a scalable, flexible and robust framework that will maximize practical results.
To demonstrate how TIES can be used for AMC, several generator emergent systems have been implemented. These use Fractals, Cellular Automata and Genetic Algorithms. The particular implementations have been optimized specifically for AMC.
AMCTIES is delivered as a set of software libraries. These have been developed on the Microsoft .NET framework. The outputs produced by AMCTIES are in the form of MIDI files. The libraries can be used to design a host of applications.
A set of music files generated by AMCTIES was subjected to the scrutiny of several experts in the music field. This scrutinization process was designed to validate the generation of each of the component musical entities. Expert responses indicate that AMCTIES can indeed generate music with a high level of creativity and novelty. Tests also show that it is difficult to significantly differentiate the output of AMCTIES from compositions by experienced human composers. Thus AMCTIES has huge commercial potential and would be of much interest to the music and entertainment industries.
