Abstract
Creative blocks in music, or perhaps any artful endeavor, are often due to imaginary limitations unknowingly imposed by the artist. Education or training in an art is comprised, in part, of rules, but ultimately, these rules are intended to be broken. “Learn the rules like a pro so that you can break them as an artist” (Picasso). This master’s project presents an application named SpeKculator. SpeKculator is a tool for helping the musician think outside the box, to help break creative blocks and facilitate the creation of music from sources influenced by, but sourced from outside, the artist. SpeKculator accomplishes this by accepting a musical objective and applying a Genetic Algorithm to a population of randomized chord progressions, the goal of which is to evolve the population to produce an individual chord progression that most closely meets the user-provided objective. The musical objective is comprised of two inputs: Color, which describes the musical spectrum from Darkness to Brightness, and Quality, which describes the musical spectrum from Dissonance to Consonance. SpeKculator produces surprisingly good results. The generated chord progressions trend toward the provided objective and most certainly do not adhere to any rules of musical composition. An unintended benefit of SpeKculator is the challenge of performing the generated chord progressions, as the chord progressions include chords that may not be familiar to the user SpeKculator provides audio and visual representations of chord progressions. Audio playback is easy to digest and assess. Visual assessment is intended to be assessed with instrument in hand.