Composing drum patterns and musically developing them through repetition and variation is a typical task in electronic music production. We propose a system that, given an input pattern, automatically creates related patterns using a genetic algorithm. Two distance measures (the Hamming distance and directed-swap distance) that relate to rhythmic similarity are shown to derive usable fitness functions for the algorithm. A software instrument in the Max for Live environment presents how this can be used in real musical applications. Finally, a user survey was carried out to examine and compare the effectiveness of the fitness metrics in determining rhythmic similarity as well as the usefulness of the instrument for musical creation.

Comunicació presentada a: 12th International Conference on Sound and Music Computing (SMC-15) celebrada del 30 de juliol a l'1 d'agost de 2015 a Maynooth, Ireland.

This research has been partially supported by the EU-funded GiantSteps project (FP7-ICT-2013-10 Grant agreement nr 610591).