Procedural Music Generator

This repository contains a procedural music generator developed as part of a master's thesis at NTNU. The program generates tonal melodies from configurable musical settings and can also produce simple four-part harmonizations.

Quick start

python3 code/main.py --form sentence --pdf --wav

This generates a melody with a sentence-like form and optionally renders notation and audio.

What the program does

The current generator supports:

• tonal melody generation in different keys and modes
• form-aware generation with auto, sentence, period, and phrase
• automatic or explicit harmonic plans
• rhythmic restriction through configurable allowed durations
• different voice profiles and ranges
• melody-only or chorale-style output
• LilyPond export, with optional PDF and WAV rendering

The system is built around an object-oriented music model and a weighted soft-constraint approach. In practice, this means the generator creates candidate melodies and prefers the ones that better satisfy musical rules such as stepwise motion, cadence shaping, chord-tone preference, and motivic reuse.

At a glance

Area	Support
Keys and modes	Major, minor, and modal tonal settings
Form	auto, sentence, period, phrase
Harmony	Automatic or explicit beat-based plans
Texture	Single melody or chorale-style output
Rendering	LilyPond source, cropped PDF, WAV
Control surface	CLI with reusable configuration in code/main.py

Repository layout

• code/ – the music generator and CLI
• docs/ – user-facing program documentation
• thesis/ – thesis source, figures, and example material
• webpage/ – archive-page builder for generated thesis examples
• research/ – notes and source material used during the project

Basic usage

Run the generator from the repository root:

python3 code/main.py

Common examples:

python3 code/main.py --key D --mode major --bars 8 --seed 1337
python3 code/main.py --form sentence --pdf --wav
python3 code/main.py --texture chorale --key Eb --bars 8 --seed 2000 --pdf --wav
python3 code/main.py --harmony "2I,2V,4I,2IV,2iv" --seed 3000 --pdf
python3 code/main.py render --seed 1337 --pdf --wav

Generated LilyPond files are written to code/output/<seed>/ by default. Optional rendering uses LilyPond for notation output and TiMidity++ for WAV export.

How it is structured

• code/main.py defines the default project configuration, especially the soft-constraint weights.
• code/app_cli.py contains the reusable command-line workflow.
• code/melody_engine/ contains the musical data structures, generator logic, harmonization logic, and export pipeline.

This makes it possible to keep the CLI stable while still experimenting with different generator settings in main.py.

Documentation and thesis

• Program documentation: docs/_build/html/index.html
• Thesis PDF: thesis/latex/main.pdf

Author-specific workflow notes for thesis building, archive generation, and deployment are kept in thesis/README.md.