Automating the composition of popular music : the search for a hit.

The field of automated music composition has existed since the 1950s and spans a wide variety of techniques. Popular music is often thought of as being compositionally simpler than classical forms but, as far as is known no automated composer has ever had a hit record. A system is proposed which uses the decomposition of an input set of existing music to guide the search for new popular music within an evolutionary algorithm. A novel representation of music is proposed to reduce the search space and is expected to improve the quality of the results.