Development of a method for automatic basso continuo playing

The purpose of this study is to develop an automatic basso continuo playing system. In order to find a musically appropriate sequence of chords, we propose the principle of “harmony cost”, which is defined as the sum of two different costs: one is the “local cost” which indicates the unlikelihood of a certain chord allocation and the other is the “transition cost”, which indicates the unlikelihood of a certain connection between two chords. Automatic basso continuo playing is realised by searching for the optimal chord sequence, which minimises the accumulated harmony cost. The proposed method is evaluated by three experiments. Each experiment verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Research highlights
► Dynamic programming enables basso continuo realisation without stating all the detailed rules concerning chord allocation and voice leading.
► The use of the beam search makes it possible to consider long musical contexts with a small amount of memory.
► Moreover, different results can be easily generated by changing the cost.