I-Corps: Automatic Music Generation Using Artificial Intelligence and Music Theory

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to revolutionize the music industry and related sectors such as game development and video production which significantly involve music. With the proposed music generation technology, copyright issues can be avoided since the music generated is completely original. Furthermore, compared to traditional composing methods which take at least an hour for the user or composer to produce a one-minute piece of music, the proposed technology spends only less than a minute to generate the music of the same length. These advantages will allow small game developers and self-media producers to generate original music that fit to their needs in a very short amount of time with minimum cost, which significantly benefits the game and self-media industries.This I-Corps project features the technology of automatic music generation from user's humming based on AI and music theory. Without any professional knowledge of music, a user can simply start by humming a short melody. Combining the AI algorithm with music theory, the application completes other necessary musical components (such as chord progression, beats and tempo) and expands the short input melody into a full piece of music for which the user can change genre and do post-editing. The technical differentiators of the proposed technology are threefold. Firstly, a pitch detection algorithm is developed to recognize the user's humming tune and turn it into musical notes, which are then optimized to conform to music theory and logic. Secondly, a novel algorithm combining Recurrent Neural Network and music theory is developed to generate a full piece of music, including the main melody, chord progression, motive and accompaniment, based on the user's short input melody. Thirdly, the post editing stage allows the user to modify the notes and genre according to the generated chord progression.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.