Creating Music Scores Live Through Interacting with a Character-level Text Generator

Résumé

LiveLily is a live sequencing and live scoring system through live coding with a subset of the Lilypond language, a textual language for Western music engraving. Being a simple yet versatile language, Lilypond provides a high level of expressiveness in the resulting music score. LiveLily can either be used as a live scoring system with acoustic instruments, or a live sequencer to control audio software. The expressiveness provided by the Lilypond language contain information on notation, dynamics, articulation, and arbitrary text. By using a textual language for the score or the sequencer, it is possible to use a character-level AI text generator to produce melodic lines based on a corpus containing LiveLily sessions. During a live coding session, the text generator is seeded with input by the live coder and sends melodic patterns for the music ensemble it is trained on. The live coder can decide whether they will use these suggestions intact, edit them, or discard them.