Music – Instruments – Electrical musical tone generation
Reexamination Certificate
2000-02-08
2001-09-25
Witkowski, Stanley J. (Department: 2837)
Music
Instruments
Electrical musical tone generation
C084S635000, C084S651000, C084SDIG001
Reexamination Certificate
active
06294720
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for creating melody pieces and rhythm patterns to be suitable for an automatic music composing apparatus and method, and a machine readable medium containing program instructions for realizing such an apparatus and a method using a computer system, and more particularly to an apparatus and a method capable of extracting a rhythm pattern from a given melody motif and creating melody pieces based on the extracted rhythm pattern and on similar and/or contrastive rhythm patterns, thereby producing a melody with good similarity or good contrast to the given motif melody or producing a rhythm pattern with good similarity or good contrast to the given rhythm pattern. The invention is applicable in various kinds of electronic musical apparatuses such as an electronic musical instrument, an automatic music composing apparatus, and a computer-system-configured music composing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Invention
The same inventor has previously proposed an automatic music composing apparatus and method for generating melody data of an amount of a tune by inputting a theme melody and extracting from the stored data base such melody generating data that represent the same or similar melody characteristics (or melody itself) as the inputted theme melody, and constructing a melody based on thus extracted melody generating data, and applied for a patent in the U.S. PTO (Ser. No. 09/212,192), which is pending in the U.S. PTO and does not constitute prior art against the present invention. The previous invention is capable of generating a melody which fits the theme melody and has abundant ups and downs.
In the above proposed automatic music composing apparatus, a melody piece for a sentence A′ which is similar to a sentence A is obtained by: 1) copying (to be identical) or imitating (to be similar) the first (or second) half melody fraction of the sentence A and paste it to the first (or second) half of the sentence A′ and newly creating a melody fraction for the second (or first) half (i.e. the remainder) of the sentence A′; 2) shifting the pitches of the notes in the melody piece of the sentence A to make a melody piece for the sentence A′; and so forth.
Further, a melody piece for a sentence B which is contrastive to a sentence A is obtained by: 3) pitch-inverting the melody of the sentence A with respect to a certain reference pitch to make a melody for the sentence B (e.g. a melody with notes C, D, E and G is inverted into a melody with notes E, D, C, A with respect to the pitch D); 4) changing the density (sparse or dense) distribution of the note in terms of rhythm in the sentence A to make a melody for a sentence B (e.g. in case the note distribution in the first half of the sentence A is sparse and that in the second half of the sentence A is dense, the note distribution for the first half of the sentence B is made dense and that for the second half of the sentence B is made sparse); and so forth.
According to the method 1) above, a newly created melody piece for the second (or first) half of the sentence A′ may not always assume a good matching to the copied or imitated melody piece for the first (or second) half of the sentence A′. According to the method 2) above, a pitch-shifted melody from the melody of the sentence A may not highly assume the characteristic features of the original melody. Thus, the obtained melody for the sentence A′ may sometimes assume poor musical similarity to the melody of the sentence A.
According to the method 3) or 4) above, a pitch-inverted melody or a note-density-changed melody from the melody of the sentence A may be well different from the original melody of the sentence A but may not always assume a musically good contrast to the melody of the sentence A to be a melody for the sentence B.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
It is, therefore, a primary object of the present invention to provide a novel type of melody creating apparatus and method, and a machine readable medium containing a program therefor capable of creating a melody which assumes a good similarity or a good contrast to a given melody.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a novel type of rhythm pattern creating apparatus and method, and a machine readable medium containing a program therefor capable of creating a rhythm pattern which assumes a good similarity or a good contrast to a given rhythm pattern.
According to the present invention, the object is accomplished by providing a melody creating apparatus which includes: a melody motif supplying device which supplies a motif melody piece; a melody analyzing device which analyzes the supplied motif melody piece to extract pitch characteristics and a rhythm pattern of the supplied motif melody piece, the extracted rhythm pattern consisting of a series of rhythmic alignment of note time points including skeleton note time points having primary importance in view of rhythm beats and non-skeleton note time points having secondary importance in view of rhythm beats; a pitch imparting device which imparts note pitches to the skeleton note time points in the extracted rhythm pattern, respectively, according to the extracted pitch characteristics to make pitch imparted skeleton notes, and imparts note pitches to the non-skeleton note time points in the extracted rhythm pattern, respectively, according to musical grammar making reference to the pitch imparted skeleton notes to make pitch imparted non-skeleton notes; and a melody producing device which combines the pitch imparted skeleton notes and the pitch imparted non-skeleton notes to produce a length of melody. Being thus structured, the apparatus creates a melody which assumes a good similarity to the supplied melody motif.
According to an aspect of the present invention, a melody creating apparatus includes: a melody motif supplying device which supplies a motif melody piece; a melody analyzing device which analyzes the supplied motif melody piece to extract pitch characteristics and a rhythm pattern of the supplied motif melody piece, the rhythm pattern consisting of a series of rhythmic alignment of note time points; a similar rhythm pattern creating device which creates a rhythm pattern being similar to the extracted rhythm pattern and consisting of a series of rhythmic alignment of note time points including skeleton note time points having primary importance in view of rhythm beats and non-skeleton note time points having secondary importance in view of rhythm beats; a pitch imparting device which imparts note pitches to the skeleton note time points in the similar rhythm pattern, respectively, according to the extracted pitch characteristics to make pitch imparted skeleton notes, and imparts note pitches to the non-skeleton note time points in the similar rhythm pattern, respectively, according to musical grammar making reference to the pitch imparted skeleton notes to make pitch imparted non-skeleton notes; and a melody producing device which combines the pitch imparted skeleton notes and the pitch imparted non-skeleton notes to produce a length of melody. Being thus structured, the apparatus creates a melody which assumes a further good similarity to the supplied melody motif.
In the above aspect of the present invention, the similar rhythm pattern creating device includes: a storing device which stores plural groups of rhythm patterns in which each one group contains a plurality of rhythm patterns which are similar to each other; a detecting device which detects, among the plural groups of rhythm patterns, a rhythm pattern which is identical with the extracted rhythm pattern; and a reading device which selectively reads out any other rhythm pattern than the detected rhythm pattern from the rhythm pattern group to which the detected rhythm pattern belongs, the read-out rhythm pattern being employed as the created similar rhythm pattern. Thus, a further better similar rhythm pattern will be selected
Rossi & Associates
Witkowski Stanley J.
Yamaha Corporation
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