Reconfigurable hardware architecture for music generation using cellular automata

Abstract

This paper proposes a hardware architecture to generate harmonized music, which is composed by melodic intervals determined from the association of cellular automata in accordance to standard MIDI protocol. The implementation of the architecture is implemented in FPGA aiming at designing an alternative efficient tool for the study and research related to the field of random music. To this end, the architecture includes four kind of cellular automata, developed through four neighborhood models with a radius of 1. The proposed architecture allows 16 possible combinations of cellular automata models. to maximize the applicability potential of the architecture, the configuration data that influence the generated music product is performed almost in entirety by the user, with no virtual limit of the number of possible melodic combinations generated by the hardware. In order to validate the effectiveness as well as efficiency of the architecture, we present some results about the generated melodies. The results were extracted by means of known musical information retrieval techniques.