Exploiting Models of Musical Structure for Automatic Intention-Based Composition of Background Music

Music is known to be able to support certain aims of presentations. In addition, there are a number of approaches to automatic music composition. Thus, it is a natural consequence, to establish automatic, intention-based music composition as an additional tool for multime-dia presentation systems. However, many related applications show unsatisfactory results. An explanation for this phenomenon is that the consideration of musical structure at diierent abstraction levels is often neglected although many relevant theories do exist and have been reened to a high level. The aim of the project described in this paper is to build a system for the automatic composition of music that supports the intentions of a given presentation. The idea underlying the system design is that the composition process works on diierent abstraction levels, so that each subset of desired intentions can be realized at the appropriate level. The resulting coordination problems make great demands on the level of musical structure which functions as a link between the presentation intentions and the musical realization. It can be seen as a kind of \rhetorical" level of music. This paper discusses the relevant aspects concerning this structural level and introduces a composition system which exploits related theories.