Willow

Abstract

Willow is a system for algorithmic composition, written in an attempt to describe some of the basic aspects of musical composition by means of grammars and automata (i.e. top-down tree transducers). It consists of a regular tree grammar, a sequence of top-down tree transducers, and a display, all loaded into the Treebag environment. The regular tree grammar generates a rhythmic skeleton, as a tree, to which the tree transducers add an attribute each, e.g. meter, melodic arc, chord progression, etc. The augmented tree is then written, in a deterministic manner, by the display (an algebra of sorts) to a file in mup-format. Output to postscript and midi is done by open source software Mup. [Technical report]

Software

Treebag is a system that allows to generate, transform, and display objects of various types, where generation and transformation is done using tree grammars and tree transducers. The basic principle is that tree grammars produce terms over symbols that are interpreted by appropriate algebras as operations on some domain. Thus, every term is viewed as an expression that denotes one of the objects of interest. These objects can be visualised using appropriate displays. [The Treebag Homepage]

Mup is a shareware program for printing music. It takes an input file containing ordinary (ASCII) text describing music, and produces PostScript output for printing the musical score described by the input. [Arkkra Enterprises]

Usage

If you are only interested in trying out the system, the easiest way to get it running is to download the jar-file together with the worksheet. Type

Changelog

Download

Paper

System

Demos

Last updated June 21 2005 by Johanna Högberg.