alphaXmas

This project, AlphaXmas, is a multimedia installation aimed to bring the audience into an experience of watching a computer generated tree growing, with a computer generated music melody in the background. The growing plant is generated using a 3D model built from an L-system and the music melody is generated using a LSTM neural networks. The generated music melodies are short monophonic Christmas carol compositions obtained from a LSTM-RNN Model. We train the model using the Hymns and Carols of Christmas dataset with around 1k historical compositions.

This is a Hackathon project for a.y. 2020-2021 Creative Programming and Computing Course of MSc. in Music and Acoustic Engineering @ Politecnico di Milano. The hackathon date is on Dec. 18th 2020, while the final presentation is on Sep. 8th 2021.

Links

• 🌐 Demo
• 📄 Report
• 📽 Hackathon presentation
• 📽 Final presentation

Resources

1. Keras, Tensorflow: Machine Learning in Python
2. p5.js: JavaScript port of Processing
3. Music21: Computer-aided Musicology Tool

Bibliography

1. Noam Chomsky. "Three models for the description of language". In: IRE Transactions on information theory 2.3 (1956), pp. 113–124.
2. James Hanan. Parametric L-systems and their application to the modelling and visualization of plants. Citeseer, 1992.
3. Yan-Bin Jia. "Quaternions and rotations". In: Com S 477.577 (2008), p. 15.
4. Qi Lyu et al. "Modelling high-dimensional sequences with lstm-rtrbm: Application to polyphonic music generation". In: Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2015.
5. Jon McCormack et al. "Interactive evolution of L-system grammars for computer graphics modelling". In: Complex Systems: from biology to computation (1993), pp. 118–130.
6. Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Mark S Hammel, and Eric Mjolsness. "Animation of plant development". In: Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques. 1993, pp. 351–360.
7. Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmayer. The algorithmic beauty of plants. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.
8. Falak Shah, Twisha Naik, and Nisarg Vyas. "LSTM based music generation". In: 2019 International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Engineering (iCMLDE). IEEE. 2019, pp. 48–53.
9. Massimiliano Zanoni. Creative Programming and Computing: Course material of MSc in Music and Acousting Engineering. 2020.