A Joyful Ode to Automatic Orchestration

Most works in automatic music generation have addressed so far specific tasks. Such a reductionist approach has been extremely successful and some of these tasks have been solved once and for all. However, few works have addressed the issue of generating automatically fully fledged music material, of human-level quality. In this article, we report on a specific experiment in holisticmusic generation: the reorchestration of Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the European anthem, in seven styles. These reorchestrations were produced with algorithms developed in the Flow Machines project and within a short time frame. We stress the benefits of having had such a challenging and unifying goal, and the interesting problems and challenges it raised along the way.