Wolfgang: "Emotions" plus goals enable learning

Abstract

In this short paper, I reflect on the design motivations for a system called WOLFGANG that composes tonal monodies. The investigated problem concerns the definition of the evaluation criteria guiding Wolfgang's compositional processing and learning. The thesis of this work is derived from the hypothesis that a system's innate sense of (musical) sound strongly influences the development of its perception, as well as composing habits. As the system develops its musical skills, it also develops a subjective use of a musical language biased by its sense of musical sounds, and its adaptation to the cultural musical grammar of its environment.