Supporting Musical Creativity With Unsupervised Syntactic Parsing

Creative Intelligent Systems

Volume

Papers from the 2008 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Music and language are two human activities that fit well with a traditional notion of creativity and are particularly suited to computational exploration. In this paper we will argue for the necessity of syntactic processing in musical applications. Unsupervised methods offer uniquely interesting approaches to supporting creativity. We will demonstrate using the Constituent Context Model that syntactic structure of musical melodies can be learned automatically without annotated training data. Using a corpus built from the Well Tempered Clavier by Bach we describe a simple classification experiment that shows the relative quality of the induced parse trees for musical melodies.