Learning and Creating Novel Harmonies in Diverse Musical Idioms: An Adaptive Modular Melodic Harmonisation System

Melodic harmonisation is a sophisticated creative process that involves deep musical understanding and a specialised knowledge of music relating to melodic structure, harmony, rhythm, texture, and form. In this article a new melodic harmonisation assistant is presented that is adaptive (learns from data), general (can cope with any tonal or non-tonal harmonic idiom) and modular (learns different aspects of harmonic structure such as chord types, chord transitions, cadences, and voice-leading). This melodic harmonisation system can be used not only to mimic given harmonic styles, but to generate novel harmonisations for diverse melodies and create new harmonic spaces, allowing for the imposition of user-defined chord constraints, leading to new unforeseen harmonic realisations. The various components of the proposed model are explained, then, a number of creative harmonisations of different melodies are presented to illustrate the potential of the system.