Bach in a box: the evolution of four part Baroque harmony using the genetic algorithm

The space of all possible musical compositions given the constraints of the standard Western tonal and rhythmic system is uncountably vast. We look at a small subsection of this space: Baroque harmony. The rules governing Baroque harmony have been carefully laid out by musical scholars, and the size of this search space becomes tractable if we are given a melody and a key signature to work with. Music is easily represented in numerical form, and is thus an obvious candidate for computer manipulation. We investigate a system using the genetic algorithm that is capable of generating well constructed Baroque-style harmonies given a user-defined melody