Computer-Aided Musical Orchestration Using an Artificial Immune System

• Published in: Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design Vol. 9596; pp. 1 - 16
• Main Authors: Abreu, José, Caetano, Marcelo, Penha, Rui
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2016; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Algorithms & data structures; Artificial Immune System; Artificial intelligence; Fitness Function; Genetic Algorithm; Musical Instrument; Singular Value Decomposition; User interface design & usability
• ISBN: 9783319310077; 3319310070
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-31008-4_1

The aim of computer-aided musical orchestration is to find a combination of musical instrument sounds that approximates a target sound. The difficulty arises from the complexity of timbre perception and the combinatorial explosion of all possible instrument mixtures. The estimation of perceptual similarities between sounds requires a model capable of capturing the multidimensional perception of timbre, among other perceptual qualities of sounds. In this work, we use an artificial immune system (AIS) called opt-aiNet to search for combinations of musical instrument sounds that minimize the distance to a target sound encoded in a fitness function. Opt-aiNet is capable of finding multiple solutions in parallel while preserving diversity, proposing alternative orchestrations for the same target sound that are different among themselves. We performed a listening test to evaluate the subjective similarity and diversity of the orchestrations.