Looking Outwards 11

I really liked Sony’s Evans-bot. An animated robot that creates songs, it is given a series of constraints for melody and harmony, a primary chord to work off of, and then a few backup chords. These constraints are called on a “leadsheet,” described by the creator as “monophonic melodies with underlying chord sequence, “in the style ” of arbitrary composers, or corpora.”

I really like this project especially because the music is programmed to sound like a particular style of a composer like George Gershwin or Irving Berlin. I’m a big Gershwin and Berlin fan so I enjoyed hearing trademarks of their music within the program. I’m not sure how a computer would’ve been programmed to create such a thing, but I highly enjoyed it and trying to reason through a potential code.

Link to Work