On the Stylistic Evolution of a Society of Virtual Melody Composers

In the field of computational creativity, the area of automatic music generation deals with techniques that are able to automatically compose human-enjoyable music. Although investigations in the area started recently, numerous techniques based on artificial intelligence have been proposed. Some of them produce pleasant results, but none is able to effectively evolve the style of the musical pieces generated. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing an evolutionary memetic system that composes melodies, exploiting a society of virtual composers. An extensive validation, performed by using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, confirms that the system is able to evolve its compositional style over time.