Melodizer rock: a constraint programming tool for composing rock music

This master's thesis presents Melodizer Rock, a tool which aims to assist composers in their rock music creation process. It is important to specify that the aim isn't to replace the musician's creativity with this tool. On the contrary, it is a tool that can and should be used to inspire composers. Melodizer Rock builds on top of three previous theses. Firstly, Baptiste Lapière's work, which was a rhythm-oriented thesis [1], generated scores which respect rhythm-specific rules given by the user. Soon thereafter, Damien Sprockeels' work on Melodizer, a pitch-oriented thesis [2], generated melodies which respect constraints given by the user. Lastly, Melodizer 2.0 aimed to combine both works, and created a tool allowing pitches and rhythms to be played simultaneously [3]. This was the work of Clément Chardon, Amaury Diels, and Federico Gobbi. Now, Melodizer Rock adds to the capabilities of Melodizer 2.0, by encoding the structure of a complete rock song within the tool. Said structure was extracted from Drew Nobile's thesis "A Structural Approach to the Analysis of Rock Music" [4], and is based on the hierarchical AABA, and srdc structure. The composer's musical ideas are given to the tool, through an easy to use interface, and are then used to build a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). Ideas are typically represented by easily quantifiable metrics, such as the pitch range or note length of a piece. However, such ideas can very well be short melodies which the composer is keen to expand on, or create a whole musical piece based off of. The aforementioned CSP is defined by the composer's musical ideas, to which each solution represents a potentially interesting and novel musical piece that might inspire them. Melodizer Rock is built as a library supplementing OpenMusic, a musical composition tool developed by IRCAM. GiL was used to connect OpenMusic to the constraint programming library Gecode, as OpenMusic is written in Common Lisp and Gecode in C++.