Novel musical partner to aid composers and non-musicians

The ARC has awarded new Linkage Projects funding of $335,250 to a team at The University of Western Sydney, led by Professor Roger Dean, who is collaborating with the Australian Music Centre, Data61, and the University of Guelph in Canada, to develop and evaluate a novel computational partner to aid composers and non-musicians to make personal music.

The new digital tool will have one computational component that learns to output musical structures, and another component to mould them towards user-desired features, while encouraging innovation and exploration. Listeners’ evaluation of the musical outputs in terms of affect will be analysed, potentially allowing the researchers to extend current music generation software considerably.

The expected outcomes will be a new instrument of creation for musicians, but also for untrained people, young and old, to make personalised music. The tool can thus provide benefits to the creative arts, and to the educational and wellbeing support sectors.