Automatic Music Composition (Software)

Factual Questions
1

[Mods, I put this in GQ because it’s software-related, but if you think CS is a better place, I won’t put coal in your stockings.]

I have a recurring need for “themed” music that can be publicly distributed (i.e. can’t be under copyright). The theme varies, and the length can vary from a few seconds to a couple of hours. All I need is instrumentals (one use is background music for video work).

There are some options available: places like archive.org have some public domain pieces, existing pieces can be licensed, artists can be hired to compose or perform classical pieces, and there exists software like Apple’s GarageBand/ or Adobe’s SoundBooth that can mix pre-existing loops in various ways to produce novel pieces. I’ve some of these methods, and they work, but they’re fairly expensive, time-consuming, or limited (especially the loop-based systems: they can really only generate a few different melodies, albeit in lots of combinations).

However, ideally I’d like to be able to generate as much original music in a given genre as I’d like, without worrying about composition skills (I have none) or copyright issues, and ideally for free or very cheap. The quality just has to be listenable, it doesn’t have to be great art.

A few years ago, there was a lot of interest in “fractal” or automatic composition computer software. There were several different mechanisms: fractal pattern music, neural-network/genetic stuff based on examples, straightforward random applications of music theory, and probably lots of others I’ve forgotten or never knew about. Some generated mostly discordant noise, but a few could actually compose decent music.

I was hoping that some of this had tricked down to the freeware/shareware/inexpensive software market, and indeed–a google search shows a number of promising candidates. But I’ve downloaded several now, and I can get exactly one of them (FractMus) to successfully install in Windows Vista – and it crashes more or less instantly when you tell it to do anything. I got one other installed on a borrowed XP machine, but it has hundreds of settings, all of which seem to produce either a single long note or white noise.

So…any ideas from the community? I’ve got 64-bit Ubuntu Linux, 64-Bit Windows Vista, and Mac OS X conveniently available to me. If I had to, I could probably get a 32-bit XP install going as well, but it wouldn’t be my first choice. I’m looking for something that gives me a fair number of “knobs” to control pace, instruments, genre, etc, but doesn’t require any real music background to use, and preferably is hard to misuse (i.e. if 99% of the possible settings produce static, that’s no good to me). I’d be willing to pay a little bit, so I’m interested in commercial options, too.

(Note that I’m NOT looking for something like Finale, that is basically a composition aid. I can’t even read music, much less write it.)

2

For MacOS, there are products like SonicFire, which have royalty-free music collections that can be automatically arranged and seamlessly fit to any length, without needing any composition skills. Here’s a kewl demo.

The Express version of the software is free, but you have to buy the music collections for $50 each. (But they are royalty-free, so once you buy them you can use it as much as you like.)

3

It depends on what type of music you want. If ambient soundscapes are acceptable, there are a few options. If you want it to sound like formal composed music, you’re out of luck - that’s a human skill.

4

Anyone remember the MTV music generator console game? It let you compose by assembling pre recorded blocks that were already set up to loop correctly. I was able to compose some good stuff pretty quickly on it without needing to know how to read music at all. SO long as you could count, you could compose accurately. Is there anything like that available out there? that might help the OP solve his/her problem.

5

Will Wright did something along this line that sounded good (ambient… But not random noise… actually sounded good). Heard him demonstrating it as an aside while talking about something else in a podcast. I’d search for his software. I don’t know if he ever made it publicly available, though.