What Is MAIDENS
MAIDENS is a Computer Aided Algorithmic Composition software program aimed at contemporary art music composers. They can use it to quickly prototype musical ideas or to explore new realms of artistic expression.
Who Built it And Why
Claudius Iacob, a programmer and a composer, built MAIDENS as a by-product of his PhD thesis (Romanian language, has English Summary) on algorithmic musical composition, defended at the National University of Music in Bucharest on July 2022.
What Is the Status
MAIDENS is an open-source, self-founded project, donations welcome. The software program itself is available free of charge in both compiled form and source code on GitHub. Roughly 3-4 versions get released yearly, for both Windows and macOS.
I would gladly use this software program as a pre-composition tool, i.e., to generate melodic and rhythmic series, to proliferate harmonic stems, etc.
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 problem
Music composition has very little to do with what is commonly thought of, especially on its classical side.
Writing art music is an immense struggle.
The moments when one musical phrase calls for another, and the entire piece grows organically like a plant from a seed are rather rare, and short lived.
Most of the time we, as composers, know very little of what will become of the music that we started writing.
If we’re lucky we might have a theme or a chords progression, but otherwise we might just as well only have a very remote idea of how our music should proceed.
And by idea, I mean something along the lines of:
it should go from peacefully and quiet to dramatic and ultimative, and then hit a plateau of sustained tension, and then progressively calm down.
Humble as it is, this is still the happy case where the composer has any idea whatsoever on what his music should be.
Far more commonly, we have nothing. We somehow come with a fragment and then blindly try to imagine sequels for it, like:
what if I would go up, and maybe add in some dissonance, will that do? What if I add a choral? Will it help if it starts faster and slows down little by little? Should I add or remove voices? Or maybe add first and then remove?
