The Pseudorandom Rhythm Section
Last year RMITCS ran a Algorithmic SATB Composition Competition, to generate a SATB song from arbitrary text. I wasn’t able to get anything working for the competition, but I did learn a bit about generating and manipulating musical scores in Python.
I already had a random chord progression generator in my miscellaneous scripts repo. I tried playing around with using that to generate scores with harmonically pleasing chords. I didn’t have much luck with text analysis; the project shifted into attempt to do some kind of instrumental jazz/bebop generator.
The melody got dropped as well, and the result is the Pseudorandom Rhythm Section, which generates a random chord progression and piano/bass acompaniment. The output is a score in MusicXML with both parts and the chord symbols. Ideal for practicing improvisation or coming up with ideas for composition.
Algorithm
To generate the chord progression, PRRS puts a V7 and IMaj7 at the end and then works backwards, making a weighted random choice between chords that tend to resolve to the “current” chord. For example:
- I, _, _, V, I
- I, _, ii, V, I
- I, vi, ii, V, I
Then the actual notes are generated working forwards. First a duration is chosen for the current chord, then for each instrument a function is called to generate the part for that instrument until the next chord change. Chords that are more cadentially significant are more likely to have a longer duration.
The bass part is just a basic walking bassline up and down the chord notes. The piano plays the current chord using a random inversion (weighted in favour of the root inversion) and random note length and rests (weighted to rest more on the beat to syncopate off the bassline). There is also a special function for each instrument to do a random closing riff at the end of the song; currently this is just a random rhythm that is increasingly likely to hold the note for longer.