Abstract:

Despite its potential use in automatic accompaniment software, guitar rhythm generation has not been discussed in computer music literature to our knowledge. This task is difficult to model due to the sketchiness of knowledge concerning this musical dimension. This paper presents an agent that generates guitar rhythmic accompaniment of a song, given its chord grid and melody. The adopted approach is the contextualized reuse of rhythmic fragments extracted from human musicians' previous performance. As a case study, we developed Cyber-João, an agent that plays Bossa Nova reusing excerpts of João Gilberto's classic records. The achieved results encourage the use of this approach in other musical styles.