Abstract

Harmonization is an important component of any comprehensive music generation system. Harmony provides context for melody and indicates the tonal framework and progression of a musical passage. One interesting element of music is that harmonic accompaniment is never strictly “wrong” or “right.” In this work, we use chord choices and their progressions as proxies for harmonic movement. By using the information contained in a chord at a given moment and an input melody note, this system will output what accompanying chord could be used next in a musical passage. An additional parameter can be tweaked which determines how “conservative” the next chord choice would be, providing more possibilities for harmonization. Composers and songwriters can use this tool to brainstorm new harmonic choices, and anyone with an interest in music can find new chord changes to their favorite songs given that they have the melody notes for such a song. This work has applications in music generation and symbolic music representation.

Date

2021

Authors

Timothy Greer, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR), Late-Breaking Demo