Automatic Generation of Melodic Accompaniments for Lyrics
Kristine Monteith, Tony R. Martinez, Dan A. Ventura · 2012
Music and speech are two realms predominately species-specific to humans, and many human creative endeavors involve these two modalities. The pairing of music and spoken text can heighten the emotional and cognitive impact of both- the complete song being much more compelling than either the lyrics or the accompaniment alone. This work describes a system that is able to automatically generate and evaluate musical accompaniments for a given set of lyrics. It derives the rhythm for the melodic accompaniment from the cadence of the text. Pitches are generated through the use of n-gram models constructed from melodies of songs with a similar style. This system is able to generate pleasing melodies that fit well with the text of the lyrics, often doing so at a level similar to that of human ability.