MELONET I: Neural Nets for Inventing Baroque-Style Chorale Variations
Dominik Hörnel · Neural Information Processing Systems · 1997
MELONET I is a multi-scale neural network system producing baroque-style melodic variations. Given a melody, the system invents a four-part chorale harmonization and a variation of any chorale voice, after being trained on music pieces of composers like J. S. Bach and J. Pachelbel. Unlike earlier approaches to the learning of melodic structure, the system is able to learn and reproduce high-order structure like harmonic, motif and phrase structure in melodic sequences. This is achieved by using mutually interacting feedforward networks operating at different time scales, in combination with Kohonen networks to classify and recognize musical structure. The results are chorale partitas in the style of J. Pachelbel. Their quality has been judged by experts to be comparable to improvisations invented by an experienced human organist.