Ode to Joy in different styles

This video illustrates the various harmonizations of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” (the world-famous European anthem), which  were realized using different prototypes developed in the Flow Machines project. “Ode to Joy in different styles” has been commissioned by the European Commission to be the soundtrack of the prestigious ERC5000 event.

Our video illustrating the techniques behind the scenes, “Machine Learning Techniques for Reorchestrating the European Anthem” has won the AAAI16 Best Video Award!

So how did we do it?

– The Bossa Nova accompaniment was produced using original guitar recordings of François Pachet and recomposed using an improved concatenative synthesis algorithm designed by Mathieu Ramona and François Pachet

– The Lounge harmonization was produced from transcriptions of lounge theme (Cookie Raver by Illumination) transcribed by Alexandre Tanguy, and transformed using an algorithm developed by François Pachet and Pierre Roy

– The jazz 6-voices harmonization was produced from transcriptions of Take 6 harmonizations by Antoine Dessein, and a system designed by François Pachet and Pierre Roy using Markov constraint techniques

– The Ennio Morricone, Beatles and Lillywood and the pricks orhestrations were produced from original recordings made by Benoit Carré, and recomposed using FlowAudio, a system designed and implemented by M. Marchini using Markov constraints techniques

– The Bach chorale was produced from MIDI transcriptions of Bach chorales, using a max entropy model developed by Gaétan Hadjeres and Jason Sakellariou

– The overall mix was performed by Benoit Carré and Emmanuel Deruty.

The videos were designed and realized by Fiammetta Ghedini.

Pachet, F. A Joyful Ode to Automatic Orchestration. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Special Issue on Intelligent Music Systems and Applications, 2016 (invited contribution; to appear)