Hello together, I want to write a program that can automaticly harmonize a melody. A friend tells me, that he has a program doing this after certain rules a componist made a long time ago, but he could not tell me more. Du such rules exist for harmonizing? How would you automatcly harmonize music? Thanks! Nathan

What he is probably refering to is the harmonising methods of JS Bach as they are the most commonly taught. Unfortunately, what you are asking is a good years worth of learning - and thats just the start.

A quick search brought up this, which looks like a decent starting point if your still interested: http://www.duckmusic.free-online.co.uk/alevel/harmony/satb01.htm

lol.. more and more ridiculous questions, please , there is no such thing as "automatic harmonizing ", music is a skill that needs to be learnt.. wtF is this world coming too?.. next time u want song generator ?..

I seem to recall a Cakewalk plugin from awhile back which was used to provide harmonic accompaniment for a solo. Of course, the problem is that you can't really do that without a pre-set chord pattern. It was fun to play with, but in the long run there was really no reason to use it instead of just making your own accompaniment. I assume that's still the situation; the computer just doesn't know as well as you do what you want to play.

FlamingBoi, be quiet.

Quote: Original post by LonelyStar
Hello together,
I want to write a program that can automaticly harmonize a melody. A friend tells me, that he has a program doing this after certain rules a componist made a long time ago, but he could not tell me more.
Du such rules exist for harmonizing?
How would you automatcly harmonize music?
Thanks!
Nathan

If I recall, the notation program Finale has some auto harmonization functions in the plug-ins menu. That might be one place to look to see how other programs impliment harmonization. I've never had a need for that feature myself, so I'm not very familiar with it. I think it's pretty much, a choice of "drop 2", "drop 4", "closed", "open", etc. Without a background in harmony, though, it might not make much sense.

The program "Band-In-A-Box" (is that still around?) allows you to put in chord changes and it will play them back in various styles, but the results are rather stiff and bland.

The problem with trying to harmonize automatically by an arbitrary set of rules is that there is no one single way to harmonize a melody. Harmony is a function of stye, genre, and cultural conventions. It's kind of like asking, "What are the rules for choosing colors to paint a sky?" That depends on whether the sky is cloudy, clear, hazy, day, night, evening, morning, in a city, over the sea, or a million other variables. Even if you decide that a sky will automatically be blue... which blue? This all reminds me of an old teacher who once gave me an assignment to go look at a black-and-white photograph and try to figure out how many shades of gray were in contained in it.

The one area of harmony which has been pretty well codified is Baroque music. Those rules are based primarily off the compositions of J.S. Bach. However, most college students spend several semesters just to get a basic foundation in this system of "rules".

uhm, vocal harmonizers do exsist, and are automatic and realtime. So.. perhaps you should use hardware to record the effect?

I seem to remember Yamaha (or some company like that) making 'virtual drummers' using neural nets, that were supposed to learn a players style and then be able to accompany them, I guess the same principle could be used for any kind of accompaniment, don't know how successful they were though.

Quote: Original post by MattCrawford
uhm, vocal harmonizers do exsist, and are automatic and realtime.

True, but what a vocal harmonizer or vocoder box does is very different from harmonizing a melody. Harmony and harmonics aren't always the same thing.

Thanks for your replies!
Actually, FlamingBoy, that's exactly what I am trying to do: A automatic song generator :).
I am just doing this because it's fun, I do not expect it to do something great!

Well, I now settled for harmonizing very simple, kind of like picking the best fitting harmony and lokking how long it can be holded!
Greetings,
Nathan