Algorithm Composes Music By Text Analyzing the World's Best Novels 31
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "The recent development of vast databases that link words to the emotions they conjure up is changing the way researchers study text. Sentiment analysis, for example, is increasingly used to gauge the mood of society on topics ranging from politics to movies. Now researchers have used the same technique to measure the "emotional temperature" throughout a novel and then to automatically compose music that reflects the content. The key advance in this work is the development of rules that map the emotional changes into musical qualities such as tempo, key pitch and so on. The team has fed a number of well known books through the algorithm, which they call TransProse. These include lighter texts such as Peter Pan and much darker novels such as The Road and Heart of Darkness. And the music isn't bad (to my untrained ear). The teams say the new algorithm could lead to audio-visual e-books that generate music that reflects the mood on open pages. And it may even be possible to use the algorithm in reverse to recommend known songs that reflect the mood in a book."
This is what happens (Score:4, Insightful)
On a positive note, they seem to have expounded our understanding of what music isn't.
Re:Noncreative work (Score:5, Insightful)
No, because either you are tone deaf or did not listen to the examples. This is just barely 15th century work. Or more like 14th with two people who agreed on a key and tempo and nothing else.
The most elegant part is the language processing, and we can only guess if that went well.
The average 10 year old with decent motor skills could do this accidentally. The suggested melodies are novel and unexpected, given that a human did not impose more than the most rudimentary constraints. A gifted composer could take these ideas as a very rough starting point, but that's as far as they got. It would be unrecognizable before the first draft, unless the composer wanted to start with the original and evolve it into something listenable.
There are positive points to make, but this in no way undermines copyright.