Abstract: | Herman is a real-time, adaptive music generation system containing rules based on music theory and film theory that is capable of changing the "scariness" of its output music in response to the control of a user. HERMAN is designed to be used in conjunction with the GhostWriter educational virtual environment currently being developed by Judy Robertson in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. It is believed that using HERMAN along with GhostWriter will help to make the children who are interacting in the GhostWriter environment feel more like a part of the virtual world. HERMAN creates its music by consulting sets of rules drawn from musical theory, using techniques from film theory to make its music scarier as required, and making any necessary decisions stochastically. In a limited formal evaluation conducted with nine volunteer subjects, HERMAN produced music of accceptable quality that varied in "scariness" as appropriate. HERMAN was developed as a joint project between the author and de Quincey (1998); this document describes the author's portion of the project: melody, and form of HERMAN.
|