What Is MAIDENS
MAIDENS is a CAAC – Computer Aided Algorithmic Composition – a software program that aims to combine the features of a notation editor with a responsive, AI-based musical material generator.
Who Is it For
The main target audience is contemporary art composers. They can use the program to delegate some of the technicalities of music writing, or to explore new realms of artistic expression.
Who Built it And Why
Claudius Iacob, an AI passionate and a composer, builds MAIDENS as a by-product of his PhD thesis on algorithmic aspects in musical composition, now ongoing at the National University of Music in Bucharest.
What Is the Status
Application is undergoing heavy development and frequent revamp cycles. Available versions are incomplete and rather unstable – yet, potentially useful. See the project roadmap for details.
I’d gladly use the program as a pre-composition tool: to generate melodic and rhythmic series, to proliferate harmonic stems (…)
Short History
After a long time of inactivity, I'm bringing back to life MAIDENS, my project of creating a computer aided algorithmic composition software program. To make a somewhat longer history shorter, the first (modest) prototype of MAIDENS launched in the first days of 2014,...
Generate Music in the Style of Claude Debussy
To start with, there is nothing new with this undertaking. The most obvious way to assess any automated process is to give it a task where both the procedure and expected outcome are well known — a task in which humans excel already. And composing in the style of...
The MAIDENS application combines these three distinct classes of functionality:
Score notation: the ability of putting together a symbolic music representation using the western classical notation system (notes on staves); among other software that provide this class of functionality Sibelius, Finale and MuseScore can be mentioned;
Music processing: operate on existing music in order to refine or transform it; transposing a bar of music is a common example of such activity;
Music generation: automatically produce complete or partial music structures based on configurable algorithms; other software that tackle this task are, e.g., MAX/MSP, SuperCollider or Csound.
As a side-note, MAIDENS contrasts with all this software by treating algorithms like black-boxes, users never have to touch the inner workings of (and couldn’t, either). Also, there is no coding involved in using MAIDENS.
