Emotional Accompaniment Generation System Based on Harmonic Progression

A music piece consists of melody and accompaniment in many genres. In this paper, we present a system to automatically generate accompaniment that evokes specific emotions for a given melody. In particular, we propose harmonic progression and onset rate as two key features for emotion-based accompaniment generation. The former refers to the progression of chords, and the latter refers to the number of music events (such as notes and drums) in a unit time. The harmonic progression and the onset rate are altered according to the specified emotion represented by the valence and arousal parameters, respectively. The performance of the system is evaluated subjectively, and the result shows a perfect positive Spearman correlation between the specified emotion and the perceived emotion.