Generating Music with Formal Grammars

What’s your Grammar Know about Music?

Well, not your Grandma, but grammar, a field of computer science that formalizes language theory. For those unfamiliar with the topic, it’s a bit similar to the grammar lessons that tortured you in grade school, except with a twist of math!

Why do we care about grammars when we are contemplating generating music algorithmically? It turns out using a special type of generative grammar known as an L-system is a great way to programmatically create our compositions. In the last post, one of the academic papers discussed this technique. Here, I’ll summarize some of that discussion and develop examples which we can use for our compositions.