The document discusses a music-creating software program developed by the author to demonstrate technological capabilities and potential for machines to equal or surpass humans in creative tasks. The program follows basic melodic and rhythmic structures to compose a simple medieval song called "Sumer is icumen in" by selecting notes and saving the audio file. While the program achieves the goal, there is room for improvement by adding more musical options and complexity. The author concludes they aim to study software engineering and artificial intelligence to further develop the program.

1. Music-creating software
By Robbie Coyne

2. How effectively can a software program
create a piece of music?
• Show the capability of technology.
• Show my own capability as a programmer.
• Demonstrate the potential of machines being equal to, possibly
surpassing humans.

3. Music:
Beauty/Emotion:
• Subjective
• Difficult to program
Signs representing vocal
or instrumental sound:
• Objective
• Easy to program
Follow basic melodic and rhythmical structures.

4. Selection of Genre:
Rock is most popular.

5. Sumer is icumen in:
Medieval:
• Simplistic
• Easily identifiable features
• Easy to program
Picked Medieval over Rock.

6. Performance:
Creates a song. Plays song. Saves song as an audio file.

7. Functionality:
• Prompt shows that song has been composed
properly.
• Program often crashes, but song continues
to play.
• If it’s the first file to be saved, the program lets
the user pick the file path.
• Prompt shows that the song has been saved as a
“.wav” file.

8. Improvements:
• Choice of time signature
• Choice of Key Signature
• Choice of tempo

9. EPQ Process:
Logbook:
• Made it easier to keep focus on
the progress of development.
• Made sure that I could refer to
it in the event that I forget
something.
Essay:
• Gave a purpose to the product.
• Gave me a motivation when adding
features.

10. Skills:
• Midi: Musical Instrument Digital Interface
• Medieval music composition
• Programming in C#

11. Future:
Software Engineering at University
Learn more about programming and AI in general.
Come back to project and give it a lot more functionality.