An organic system for tonal composition

This paper aims to discuss and question the separation between computational musicology research involving tonal musics, and the creative composition and generation of tonal musics. It considers how style modelling and synthesis relate to creative pursuits, and the problems in applying pritlciples from computational musicology to creative purposes. Potential hurdles in this relationship include a pervasive reluctance to recognise computer-created works as genuinely creative, as well as the musical specificity required by analytical stylemodelling. I argue that there is a teleological aesthetic difference between computational creativity and compositional creativity, which affects the perception of a composed work as being 'creative'. The crucial difference between these paradigms is the agency of the (hwnan) composer within the creative process. The author's own composing system, Deviate, is described briefly and evaluated in regard to these issues.