Generative Music for Live Musicians: An Unnatural Selection

Abstract

An Unnatural Selection is a generative musical composition for conductor, eight live musicians, robotic percussion, and Disklavier. It was commissioned by Vancouver’s Turning Point Ensemble, and premiered in May 2014. Music for its three movements is generated live: the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material is based upon analysis of supplied corpora. The traditionally notated music is displayed as a score for the conductor, and individual parts are sent to eight iPads for the musicians to sight-read. The entire system is autonomous (although it does reference a pre-made score), using evolutionary algorithms to develop musical material. Video of the performance is available online. 1 This paper describes the system used to create the work, and the heuristic decisions made in both the system design and the composition itself.