Are you a professional musician looking to explore new tonal domains and ideas?
Do you wish to express your emotions through music without years of music theory?
Are you a performer or DJ eager to channel your creativity in fresh ways?
Are you a scientific researcher focused on the objective analysis or real-time generation of music?
Are you in the music industry and searching for novel methods of music curation or production?
Are you in the gaming industry seeking innovative methods for adaptive music?
Are you a music therapist, a content creator, or simply interested in listening to new forms of music?
Are you an investor recognising the potential market for any of these?
Welcome to Tonamic: Crafting Emotions into Music
Emotions are complex and dynamic phenomena, extending far beyond simple labels like sad or happy - and so is music, the most enigmatic yet effective medium for conveying emotions.
Tonamic is an ambitious project that seeks to transform emotions into music in real-time, creating a new language of expression that crosses traditional musical boundaries. At its core, Tonamic is about exploring music at a very fundamental level, diverging from traditional music theory and mainstream AI music. The aim is to open up new domains of artistic creation, adaptive music generation, and potential applications in fields as varied as entertainment, research, therapy, and gaming.
A Revolutionary Approach to Music Analysis and Creation
Our approach complements both conventional and data-driven music analysis and composition. Rather than focusing on the arrangement of tones, based on the existing samples or musical rules, we quantify the emotional properties of music in terms of variations in dissonance and predictability. We then arrange the tones through a unique generative method we call affect-prescribed composition. This technique allows us to capture the emotional essence of music, translating it into polyphonic scores in real-time, without any trainable parameters.
Tonal Properties and Emotional Affect
The core of our project lies in identifying, quantifying, and controlling musical tonality to evoke specific emotional responses to musical tension and surprise. Our algorithmic innovation enables the generation of music that is not only diverse but also rich in naturally occurring rhythms, keys, and modulations. This diversity reflects the vast potential of our approach to affect-prescribed composition, which reimagines music notation in the context of tonality-affect space, rather than traditional pitch space.
Soundscape of Emotions
We invite you to experience the unique outcomes of our project through electronic renditions available on our website. These samples showcase the application of our prescribed tonal properties, offering a glimpse into the diversity of the output in terms of genre, quality and some general measures of the emotional content. The graphs below show the wide distribution of the quality and valence of our initial compositions, not only reflecting our moods and expression skills while composing but also underling the capacity of the Tonamic system as a versatile musical instrument.
Distribution of the 'Quality Score' of 60 pieces that we have composed using the Tonamic system, according to SoundCloud's Musiio Tag. The composers of these pieces have had no prior training in musical composition.
Distribution of the 'Mood Valence' of the same 60 pieces according to SoundCloud's Musiio Tag. More than half of the pieces have a neutral valence. The positive values indicate pleasant emotions such as happiness.
Explore a few of the samples below, and to support our journey, follow our social media channels and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more updates and samples.
Alien Dance
Dragon Lady
Magpie Anthem
Abyss
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