Ah - found your question.
First and foremost I am not sure computer generated music is the way to go - it would be far easier to get a musician to record some MIDI files for you and then you can play them back in different ways - presumably there are plenty of musicians in a university...
failing that I would expect you will have to make different models for the different types of music. The Markov Chain approach will work for some of them but it misses out huge chunks of what different music types are about - for example punk is musically very simple but what stops if being dull as dishwater is the anger and energy put into it by the performers - computer generated punk is probably a lot harder than generating something like Bach or Phillip Glass style music which is more about the structure and composition. Like wise the blues is very simple musically but is about the experience of the musician - I would suggest that computer generated blues would be very close in experience to "Richard Clayderman plays..." (elevator music of the lowest kind)
cheers
mark
-----Original Message----- From: pd-list-admin@iem.kug.ac.at [mailto:pd-list-admin@iem.kug.ac.at] On Behalf Of Nicolau Werneck Sent: 02 September 2002 18:37 To: pd-list@iem.kug.ac.at Subject: [PD] [OT] Sensitivity to timbre and adequacy of instruments to musics
Hello, people.
Sorry if I'm off-topic, but I think maybe I could reach people here who would be interested on this.
I'm beginning a research at my university, and I'm looking for comments and suggestions from other people.
The research goal is to catalog correlations between kinds of music (that is, musics with similar structures) and the timbre of instruments that are selected by people to play them. Basically, we are going to play computer generated music to listeners, and ask them if the instrument used is adequate to the music. We expect to find, for example, that surf music is better with a lot of reverberation, punk rock is better with a lot of overdrive, blues is better with just a bit of overdrive, and so on...
The project will be developed in two parts: first we will measure the sensitivity that people have to variations on the parameters of the models of the effects. Then we will play the musics, and find the correlations.
It looks like the worst problem we will find is on the composition of the musics. I'm thinking about finding stochastic models to various styles of music, and than program a music generator. Does anybody here have any experience on generating random music in PD? What would be the best approach? Making an external program that export the song in MIDI, and bring it to PD?
...Thank you, bye!!