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That's so interesting - you're totally right that setting constraints often leads to really creative ideas. It reminds me of the "crab canons" by Mozart and Bach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_canon .

I also think there's room for other creative encodings for music - possibly expanding these notewise/chordwise ideas, or possibly going in a totally new direction. It's fascinating to me how much the generations are affected by the encoding.

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Another fun direction is to generalize the kinds of constraints we put on our own instruments! I had a chance to play with that in a graduate class by implementing an API for midi generation where you set chord fingerings and strum patterns independently for a guitar of [N] strings.

Of course, I had to "play" the guitar myself by writing song sequences in those terms... it would be terrific to see what an AI could do with a notation scheme representing, say, a 20 string guitar or a 30 foot long flute.

Baudelaire said something like that (about the sonnet): "Parce que la forme est contraignante, l'idée jaillit plus intense" (poor translation: "because the form is constraining, the idea comes out more intense")

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