Eric Nichols, Dan Morris and Sumit Basu developed a tool that allows people who are making music to easily build harmonies on their music. By using lots of sample data, they are easily able to take a melody and generate several pleasing chord progressions that fit with the melody. This tool allows the user to explore and easily and quickly build harmonies in their music. From the input data, a widget is generated with several sliders, each one representing a different artist or genre of music. Buy adjusting these sliders, the user can change the type or style of chords that are generated. The users in the user study found this tool to be very useful and fun. Some of the users though did express that they would like the ability to manually change specific measures and the frequency of chord changes.
I think this has potential to be a good music writing tool. I would also like to see extra features added like the ones some of the users specified. I'd love to toy with it for a while and see what I could come up with.
I thought this would be particularly useful for people not familiar with music theory. It allows creativity without the need to know a lot about music. Of course, allowing this audience creation abilities may not be a good thing.
ReplyDelete