HARMONET: A Neural Net for Harmonizing Chorales in the Style of J. S. Bach

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 4 (NIPS 1991)

Bibtex Metadata Paper

Authors

Hermann Hild, Johannes Feulner, Wolfram Menzel

Abstract

HARMONET, a system employing connectionist networks for music pro(cid:173) cessing, is presented. After being trained on some dozen Bach chorales using error backpropagation, the system is capable of producing four-part chorales in the style of J .s.Bach, given a one-part melody. Our system solves a musical real-world problem on a performance level appropriate for musical practice. HARMONET's power is based on (a) a new coding scheme capturing musically relevant information and (b) the integration of backpropagation and symbolic algorithms in a hierarchical system, com(cid:173) bining the advantages of both.