Mathematically Generated Fife Tunes

Abstract

Trying completely to reduce musical composition to a simple mathematical algorithm may be impossible, but mathematics undeniably plays a major role in writing music. To investigate the role of mathematics in musical composition, we created a model that randomly generates music predominantly using a Markov chain. A Markov chain is a set of possible states and the probabilities that a given state will lead to any of the others. For this model, the states were a particular note (or sequence of notes) extracted from a data set of about 200 fife tunes. Using the probabilities as weights, the model then randomly generates a new, fife-tune-like song.