Automatic musical composition

[scibor]

Hey guys,

I'm new to these forums, and I'm not a skilled musician. In fact I'm an Electrical Engineer in my Senior year at college, and am required by my school to create an impressive project over the course of one year.

Being that I have some interest in music, but not too much experience, I was wondering if some of your more experienced guys could maybe help me shape a project that I have had in mind.

The original proposal was as follows: an electronic keyboard is required. The user would play the keyboard and as he/she does, the keyboard learns things about the players' style, I was thinking a good way to classify music for this context would be to identify the mood of a particular composition (is the song the player is playing, happy, sad, uplifting, fierce, or some mixture of emotions?).

This sort of identification has been done in the past, and is in fact doable.

The second part of the project I had suggested was that once the players' style has been successfully identified, the keyboard's internal electronics would then auto-compose the remainder of a track, recording the entire track along the way. This part, however, is infinitely more difficult, it is hard for an amateur musician to know about composing music, and it is hard from an EE point of view to guarantee that the auto composed music is unique every time.

So the question, basically, is what do musicians think is useful? Is musical composition a doable thing, given that you basically know "the jist" of a song being played? Or does anyone have any other suggestions that could prove interesting, having identified the style? The only additional requirement is that something be done in real time, I can't store this data and then give feedback later, something needs to start happening on the keyboard that is meaningful musically.

My alternative, slightly similar idea, was to provide a backing track (keyboards usually have built in sound banks to provide sounds to mimic many instruments, so maybe you're playing a sad piano song and then the keyboard auto generates some violin in the background to match it?)

I realize this isn't exactly a music question, but music is something I'm interested in as well as the EE material, and I was hoping to gain some insight in this matter from more experienced individuals?