An Accompaniment System with Independence

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new accompaniment system which takes independence from the soloist into consideration. In order to make a natural-sounding ensemble, we allow our system to change its independence dynamically from the soloist according to the musical situation. We introduce three new techniques into our accompaniment system. "The performance plan" allows the system to perform with expression as a human player would. "The independence rate" corresponds to how independently the system should perform from the soloist. "The time of the ensemble" provides information to enable the system to correct its tempo according to the independence rate. In order to evaluate the system, we carried out a listening experiment where the subjects listened to three versions of the same musical piece. The first was accompanied by a real human being, while the other two were computer-accompanied, where the first system simulated past researches which lacked the techniques mentioned above, while the second incorporated them. The results of the experiment show that our system which incorporated the three techniques sounds better than the system based upon past researches, and that it even sounds as good as a human accompanist.