A Planning-based Approach for Music Composition

. Automatic music composition is a fascinating field within computational
creativity. While different Artificial Intelligence techniques have been used
for tackling this task, Planning – an approach for solving complex combinatorial
problems which can count on a large number of high-performance systems and
an expressive language for describing problems – has never been exploited.
In this paper, we propose two different techniques that rely on automated planning
for generating musical structures. The structures are then filled from the bottom
with “raw” musical materials, and turned into melodies. Music experts evaluated
the creative output of the system, acknowledging an overall human-enjoyable
trait of the melodies produced, which showed a solid hierarchical structure and a
strong musical directionality. The techniques proposed not only have high relevance
for the musical domain, but also suggest unexplored ways of using planning
for dealing with non-deterministic creative domains.