EvoSpeak

Yes, I know. Way too many new plugins lately. I can't help it, I have to find some new inspiration. The assisted compositions are falling into a rut and mGen needs some variety pretty badly. So I'm trying a new melody method, EvoSpeak.

EvoSpeak will be the first plugin featuring a true hybrid engine. It will incorporate an evolutionary system based on a grammar engine. The grammar engine will not be a derivative of WordSmith or the WordEngine, nor will it copy the format of GGrewve. This grammar engine will be based off of the lighter and more manageable GrammGen engine, with some obvious modifications for greater efficiency. I've basically developed two grammar systems and I have yet to hit the sweet spot for melodies. GrammGen introduced a very simple and very light-weight grammar system based off of loosely-defined words. The results were interesting but have failed to keep my attention for very long. The GGrewve engine brought with it a much deeper and extremely effective grammar engine. The GGrewve (and, subsequently, WordSmith) engine, however, is not altogether flexible. It basically requires MIDI files to create styles since the words are much more complex than those of GrammGen.

With the EvoSpeak engine, I hope to achieve the impressive coherence and variety of the GGrewve engine but with the efficiency and originality of the GrammGen system. The evolutionary model should allow a fundamentally simple grammar to come together into a much more complex system. Loosely speaking, the EvoSpeak engine is also a statistical model. The evolutionary model actually "evolves" via a statistical model, but "speaks" via a grammar.

Implementation is in alpha stages right now so I'm really not sure what to expect since this is my first real endeavor into evolutionary models (I tried a very, very basic evolutionary drum model as one of my first plugins ever, but it was way too simple and poorly-coded to achieve anything).

Slow

Work's going a little slow this week as I have a lot on my plate, especially starting my internship (32 hour week).  I'm brushing up WordSmith here and there, trying to improve the dictionary analysis quality so renders choose more appropriate words. What worked well for drums is taking quite a bit more messing with to work well for other instruments.

Unfortunately I'm having doubts concerning the viability of grammatical subdividion with non-percussive instruments.  While it may be possible, I think it's lacking in structure.  Perhaps there also needs to be a higher-order grammatical structure to guide motifs so that they do not lack direction.

The question is, then, how does one classify a higher-order grammar?  What symbols make up such a grammar?  Perhaps phrases could be classified as "suspenseful," "tense," or "declining."  Of course there could be loads of other adjectives.  The point is that sentences.  Sense do not make?  When words a sense of direction lack!  Yes, that was a bit of a punny example of how grammar can go wrong.

Rough days ahead for algorithmic composition.  Fasten your seatbelts and keep a pale ready for sea-sickness.  We will be experiencing some turbulent, nonsensical grammar.

WordSmith - Generalized Grammar

Today I began construction of a more generalized grammar framework - very similar to the one upon which GGrewve runs, except extended to work for melodic instruments as well as percussive ones.  I began a crucial part of this rewriting today with WordSmith - the new equivalent to GGrewveWriter.

WordSmith is a generalized grammar/dictionary synthesizer capable of taking a "training file" in MIDI form and constructing a dictionary from the file.  WordSmith, unlike GGrewveWriter, actually has a very flexible interface and of course will work for any instrument, not just drums.  In addition to the usual features of the last grammar analysis tool, WordSmith will also include extended features such as time compression and maybe even synthesis tools like hybridization and mutation for more random possibilities.

As a minor under-the-hood tweak, WordSmith will perform extensive quantitative abstract analysis on individual words (categorizing intensity and such) so that plugins like GGrewve don't have to waste valuable processing time doing analysis that can be done once up front instead of once every run.  This will also greatly increase the possibilites for such analysis, since a one-time processing cost will allow for much more extensive and in-depth analysis of the grammar. Users won't mind having to wait half a minute to create a dictionary, as long as it doesn't take the same amount of time every time the dictionary is used by a plugin.  Which it won't.  It'll only take milliseconds for the plugins to access that analysis data that will have already been created by WordSmith.

Grammatical subdivision is going full speed ahead, and I hope this promising method won't let me down.