MELOMICS

Starting from a technology for music composition individually developed by Prof. Francisco J. Vico during 2009 and 2010, Melomics  started as a research project under development at the University of Malaga (more information here). It has been partially funded by the INNPACTO program for technology transfer (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness). It aims at modifying this technology to provide adaptive computer-composed music playing in therapeutic applications. 

During the fall of 2010 it started to operate as a university spin-off, as it was granted a second price in the XIII Academic Spin-Offs Call of the University of Malaga, a program running since 1998 to support the commercialization of groundbreaking ideas boosted by researchers and students.

Melomics' computational systems constitute a by-product of this project. These innovative systems applies non-conventional evolutionary algorithms to composing melodies without human intervention. The algorithm operates on data structures (functioning as genomes) which indirectly encode the melodies: each genome undergoes an artificial developmental process to generate the corresponding melody. As melodies evolve, they can be rendered in several formats: playable (MP3), editable (MIDI and MusicXML) and readable (score in PDF). This diversity of formats ensures that the songs can be reproduced by computers and portable media players, edited with professional music software, or played in live performances. The application of the Melomics system to contemporary music composition has been analized in a paper published by Leonardo Music Journal in 2011.

Melomics109 is a computer cluster fully dedicated to compose and synthesize music, which is collected in an ever growing repository of music featuring most essential genres. As this technology develops, longer and more complex music fragments are generated.