A probabilistic approach to determining bass voice leading in melodic harmonisation

Dimos Makris

Maximos Kaliakatsos-Papakostas

Emilios Cambouropoulos

pp. 128-134

in: Tom Collins, David Mérédith, Anja Volk (eds), Mathematics and computation in music, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

Melodic harmonisation deals with the assignment of harmony (chords) over a given melody. Probabilistic approaches to melodic harmonisation utilise statistical information derived from a training dataset to harmonise a melody. This paper proposes a probabilistic approach for the automatic generation of voice leading for the bass note on a set of given chords from different musical idioms; the chord sequences are assumed to be generated by another system. The proposed bass voice leading (BVL) probabilistic model is part of ongoing work, it is based on the hidden Markov model (HMM) and it determines the bass voice contour by observing the contour of the melodic line. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed BVL method indeed efficiently captures (in a statistical sense) the characteristic BVL features of the examined musical idioms.