Speedy Composer — I used to be a big fan of neural networks and still wait for promising developments. Over the past decade or so it’s become apparent that something is missing from the theory. This fellow uses them to create crappy music. I say crappy because it’s not quite dreadful. Still, there may be something to this.

During my studies in the Department of Computer Science of The Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo, I did a project called Speedy Composer – an Artificial Neural Network Melody Composer. this project had also a research part, because this area has not been researched much before. The project’s target is to write a program that will compose music, that is based on parameters & chords given by the user. The final target is letting a user select parameters, chords & possibly the beginning of a melody, and then the program will compose a new melody for the user.

Artificial Neural Networks are a new area in computer science. This area is called like this, because in a way, it imitates the human brain. An Artificial Neural Network is a set of simple processing units (“neurons”), that are connected to each other in a parallel network. Each unit (“neuron”) implements a simple mathematic function, but the global structure of the network makes the network able to to perform complex calculations. This processing method is similar to the method used in the human brain, that is consisted of billions of neurons, and with a very complicated connectionism is able to perform actions like seeing, hearing, motorical coordination, intuition, thinking, understanding, memory etc.

via K. Burel