Computer-assisted composition of popular music guitar tablatures – TABASCO

The TABASCO project (TABlature ASsisted COmposition) aims at elaborating algorithmic methods to assist musicians, of all skills and influence, in the process of composing and writing guitar scores in modern popular musical styles. These methods aim at facilitating the access to musical composition and encouraging a diversification in the composers creative process. They relate to the fields of digital humanities and digital approaches for artistic creation. The first axis of the project is a musicological study on guitarists composition practices based on surveys of guitar music composers. The results will contribute to identify composition contexts for which algorithmic tools can improve the composer's experience, in particular by facilitating and diversifying the expression of its musical style. The second axis of the project focuses on the elaboration of algorithmic methods for the modeling of gesture annotations indicating hand positions and playing techniques specific to the instrument. Predicting these annotations offers to the composer an original approach to gradually vary the stylistic expressivity of its composition. The third axis focus on the elaboration of algorithmic models facilitating the transfer of the style of a reference musical content to an other content being composed. The design of these methods will be inspired by works in text and image generation. Style transfer assists the composer wishing to get inspired by the style of some reference scores and help him to extend stylistic uniformity of the score he is composing. These methods will be experimented and released through user plugins in a software dedicated to music notation and composition.