Re: random music

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 03:47:26PM -0400, Mike Blackstock wrote:
> Me too I've long been interested in this; I'd like to be able to
> generate endless sight-reading exercises/material for guitarists,
> perhaps in the form of duos with the computer playing one of the parts
> just to keep things interesting. I've downloaded but haven't yet
> looked at Strasheela
> (http://strasheela.sourceforge.net/strasheela/doc/index.html),
> thinking it might be something useful for such a project. Plus I think
> Graham has expertise in it.

You might be interested in the second chapter of my Masters
thesis, which is about using Strasheela to create
not-quite-endless sight-reqading exercises for rhythms (general
musicians) and intonation (for beginning violinsts).

I wrote the thesis for a general audience of computer scientists
and musicians, so the mathematics (which is fairly simple... say,
first-year CS) is fairly isolated and easy to skip over if you're
not interested in the proofs.


There's of course the possibility of using that system to create
truly "endless" exercises by continually grading the exercises
(chapters 3+4) and feeding that back into the exercise generation.
The current "weakest link" in such a system is the grading --
giving a meaningful grade to even something as simple as a 4/4
rhythm with 4th and 8th notes is non-trivial.  I hope to have the
beginning of musically-meaningful grading for such rhythms in a
year or so.

Cheers,
- Graham