On the Impact of Directed Mutation Applied to Evolutionary 4-Part Harmony Models

This paper analyzes the difficulty of finding solutions for the 4-part harmony problem, both from the point of view of the size of the search space and the time required to run the algorithm. These considerations led to improved running time through parallelization, precalculation of the fitness function, and directed mutation, which reduces the time to solution. Moreover, we show how combining these techniques allows us to extend the improvements to different harmony models, including new synthetic ones that may be proposed.