Automated Planning and Music Composition:

an Efficient Approach for Generating Musical Structures

Valerio Velardo (U1370329@hud.ac.uk) and Mauro Vallati (M.Vallati@hud.ac.uk)
1 2

1
School of Music, Humanities and Media; School of Computing and Engineering
2

Introduction Flatten and tree approaches

Numerous systems have been developed for generating The generation process of the melodic structure is defined as a planning problem, in which three
melodies, but none exploits automatic planning and only a few operators (i.e., introduce new element, repeat element, vary element) are employed to generate the
focus on melodic structure. elements of the structure.

In this work, we fill this gap by introducing two algorithms based A musical structure is a solution to the planning problem that minimises the costs associated with
on planning able to generate the structure of a melody. operators.

Two different approaches have been developed:

• flatten: considers the level of phrases only
• tree: considers all 3 structural levels
What is automated planning?
Planning is an AI technique that studies the selection of
actions to reach a state of the system that satisfies a number of
goals.
Experimental evaluation
original state target state Three music experts were asked to provide a score between 1 and 10 to 30 short melodies generated
by the following algorithms: flatten, tree, random-walk [1].
C
B B
A C A

Fig. 1 - A typical example of a planning problem. Planning is usually employed

for ploblem-solving tasks, but it has recently been used in creative domains.

Defining melodic structure

Fig. 4 - Example of a melody generated with the tree method.
In our model, the structure of a melody has 3 hierarchical levels:
• phrases: group of few notes
• double-phrases: two or more phrases
• sentences: two or more double-phrases There was a moderate agreement between raters (Fleiss K = 0.43). Tree and random-walk scored
significantly higher than flatten. There was no significative difference between tree and random-walk.

Fig. 2 - Example of hierarchical structure in the first movement of the Sonata

KV333 by Mozart. The top level sentence is divided into two double-phrases, and
four phrases.
Fig. 5 - Mean of scores for the different algorithms examined.

Framework
Conclusions
For generating a melody, we employ a top-down approach to
develop the melodic structure and a bottom-up technique We proposed the first system which creates musical structures by exploiting automated planning.
introduced in [1] to fill the structure with notes. This work demonstrates that:
• automated planning can be useful for music metacreation
• structure plays a central role for generating human-like melodies
melodic structure generator
(AI planning)
In the future, we will use planning for other tasks such as orchestration and generation of notes.

(random-walk)

References
[1] Velardo, V., Vallati, M.: Automatic music composition and evolution: a cognitive-based approach.
Fig. 3 - Main components of the developed systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology, 2014.