Labs 3 – Music

Procedural Content Generation for Computer Games

Vojtěch Černý

cerny@gamedev.cuni.cz

Prerequisites

• Windows / Mac / Linux
• Python 3

The Task

Generate music!

Freeform Event

• This is a freeform HW of this class, so try whatever approach you want!
• Try any music style
• Try any music mood
• …
• If stuck:
• Consult slides from the lecture
• Contact me at e-mail / Discord

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• To give some criteria, you should experiment with some stuff from the following slide

Try at least 3 of these

• Procedural bass
• Procedural drums
• Music with multiple instruments (not counting the above)
• Procedural harmonization (underlying chords)
• Key change
• Large-scale structure (verse-chorus)
• Experiment with noise
• generator not provided, but value noise is quite simple
• Use random walks
• Create different musical genres
• Describe a mixed-initiative (human+algorithm) process to create a song

The challenges

• What is good music?

The Repository

Start with the music-generation repo

This time, no Gradle, pure Python

Tested in Python3.9, requirements are in requirements.txt

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For an example usage, see (and run) example.py

Points

• Generated music – required
• Described at least 3 things tried out – 1pt each (upto 3pts)
• Bonus point: create an “album cover” by using http://dryad.technology/artist/ (or any art toy of your choosing)

Submission details

• Send your solutions to cerny@gamedev.cuni.cz
• Prefix the subject with “NAIL123-HW3”
• Submit:
• one file of Python that generates music
• 5 generated MIDIs (don’t need to be too varied)
• upload of an “album” to SoundCloud (so that our soundfonts don’t differ)
• describe what you have tried, what worked or didn’t, the problems you faced
• describe your music, what you like about it
• how much time you spent with the project (will not be part of evaluation)
• bonus: Art Cover
• Deadline is 20.4.
• If you need more time, talk/write to me before the deadline

Questions / Problems

• You can always e-mail me at cerny@gamedev.cuni.cz
• I’m also frequently online at Discord https://discord.gg/4nfAzG

Why are we suddenly using Python?

• Python is a great language for rapid prototyping, and quite expressive when working with lists/arrays, both of which is useful for this task

Q & A

Vojtěch Černý

cerny@gamedev.cuni.cz