[skissane]

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?

[big_t]

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.

[0] https://github.com/ThomasMatlak/is-software/tree/master/gene...