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Your query term was 'number = 92-21'1 report found
- ÖFAI-TR-92-21 (
434kB g-zipped PostScript file)Abstract Qualitative Perception Modelling and Intelligent Musical Learning
- Gerhard Widmer
- The research described in this article is concerned with one of the fundamental phenomena of intelligence, namely, the ability to learn. In particular, we are interested in intelligent systems that can learn, or be taught, to perform musical tasks and solve musical problems. This kind of research naturally leads to the question of what the prerequisites for effective learning are. In this article, it will be argued and demonstrated that fundamental knowledge about the domain is important and, indeed, indispensable if a system is to learn problem solving rules for a complex musical task effectively. That again leads us to ask what fundamental musical knowledge is and how it can be represented and reasoned about in a computer program. The research described in this article is a logical continuation of an earlier project that dealt with much simpler musical problems. It contributes to the above-mentioned goals in several ways: the article presents a general, abstract perception model for a comparatively simple sub-domain of tonal music; the model is meant to capture, in a qualitative way, some of the aspects that govern the way people `hear' harmonized melodies. This is the fundamental musical `knowledge' we want to equip our system with. We then present arguments for the importance of such knowledge for learning and describe a system that uses the perception model in the process of learning to harmonize given melodies from examples of correct and incorrect solutions. Accordingly, the article is divided into two parts; the first part is devoted to the general perception model; the second part then describes the learning system and illustrates its workings with an example.