Splicing music composition

Splicing systems were introduced by Tom Head (1987) as a formal model of a recombination process between DNA molecules. The existing literature on splicing systems mainly focuses on the computational power of these systems and on the properties of the generated languages; very few applications based on splicing systems have been introduced. In this paper we show a novel application of splicing systems: we use them to build an automatic music composer. The proposed system can be seen also as a new valid bio-inspired strategy for automatic music composition. It is tailored on 4-voice chorale-like music. We define a new music representation based on words, which extends an earlier splicing approach and uses additional music information to produce music in a quick and effective way. A performance study shows that our composer outperforms other meta-heuristics by producing better music according to a specific measure of quality evaluation. Moreover, the composition is carried out in a shorter time and using less memory with respect to a previous approach.