Has anyone done work on automated evaluation of the quality of a musical composition? Possibly by training a neural network, or maybe even just by designing some heuristic rules which try to capture what elements make music pleasing to humans?
Then, could you train a neural network (or a genetic algorithm, or whatever) to compose music that is assigned a high quality score by such a composition quality evaluator?
I actually just recently took a shot at something very similar to this for my undergrad thesis! [0]
I used genetic algorithms to generate 4 measure melodies, using a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to determine the fitness of melodies. I trained the LSTM on snippets of music by J.S. Bach. It was able to distinguish between random noise notes and actual music quite well, and to a somewhat lesser degree between Bach and other composers.
The melodies it produced were...mixed in quality. I really liked some of them, but quite often it would get stuck at some local maxima of the fitness and couldn't mutate its way to something better.
Then, could you train a neural network (or a genetic algorithm, or whatever) to compose music that is assigned a high quality score by such a composition quality evaluator?