GiTab: Automatic Tablature Music Composition for Classical Guitar

09/23/2021

A guitar tablature is a form of musical notation that indicates the fret and string on which each note should be played. For beginner guitar players and guitarists who cannot read scores, this form of notation is essential. On the guitar, unlike other instruments such as the piano, each note exists in one or more different positions on the guitar. So, when we want to play a set of notes, there are several ways to do it. The goal of the thesis is to produce automatic tablatures of classical music by trying to optimize the positions chosen for each note. It is also a goal of this dissertation to choose the fingers that press the frets in order to produce the sounds of the respective notes. The problem of automatically generating a tablature by optimizing the choices of positions is a typical AI problem. Since there are one or more different positions for each note, the growth of possible ways to play a set of notes is exponential. We create the GuiTab system which, using a set of rules and heuristics, can optimize the choice of positions and exclude the least promising hypotheses. The results of our system were compared with published tablatures, where we obtained an average of 68\% accuracy, values like those obtained by works based on Machine Learning. The subjective evaluation showed us that the tablatures generated by the system are always playable, and sometimes the system choices that diverge from published tablatures are justified.

Authors in the community:

• 

  M

  Martim Zanatti dos Santos Gomes da Silva

  ist182517

Supervisors of this institution:

• 

  H

  Helena Sofia Andrade Nunes Pereira Pinto

  ist12906

• 

  D

  David Manuel Martins de Matos

  ist13500

electrical-engineering-electronic-engineering-information-engineering - Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico