HARMONIZE THIS MELODY: AUTOMATIC FOUR-PART HARMONY GENERATION USING NEO-RIEMANNIAN VOICE-LEADING

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 sys-tem 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 fa-vorite songs given that they have the melody notes for such a song. This work has applications in music generation and symbolic music representation.

和声是任何综合音乐生成系统的重要组成部分。和声为旋律提供背景，并表明一段音乐的调性框架和进行。音乐的一个有趣之处在于，和声伴奏从来没有绝对的“错”或“对”。在这项工作中，我们使用和弦选择及其进行来代表和声运动。通过利用给定时刻和弦中包含的信息以及一个输入的旋律音符，该系统将输出在一段音乐中接下来可以使用什么伴奏和弦。可以调整一个额外的参数，该参数决定下一个和弦选择有多“保守”，从而为和声提供更多可能性。作曲家和词曲作者可以使用这个工具来激发新的和声选择的灵感，任何对音乐感兴趣的人，如果他们有一首喜爱歌曲的旋律音符，就可以为这首歌找到新的和弦变化。这项工作在音乐生成和符号音乐表示方面有应用。