Apollo: An Interactive Environment for Generating Symbolic Musical Phrases using Corpus-based Style Imitation

Abstract: With the recent developments in machine intelligence and web technologies, new generative music systems are being explored for assisted composition using machine learning techniques on the web. Such systems are built for various tasks such as melodic, harmonic or rhythm generation, music interpolation, continuation and style imitation. In this paper, we introduce Apollo, an interactive music application for generating symbolic phrases of conventional western music using corpus-based style imitation techniques. In addition to enabling the construction and management of symbolic musical corpora, the system makes it possible for music artists and researchers to generate new musical phrases in the style of the proposed corpus. The system is available as a desktop application. The generated symbolic music materials, encoded in the MIDI format, can be exported or streamed for various purposes including using them as seed material for musical projects. We present the system design, implementation details, discuss and conclude with future work for the system.