Melodic Contour Generation with Spline Models of Cycles

In this paper we present techniques to generate melodies which follow the contours coming from segments of audio signal graphs. We refer to these segments as cycles, which we model with cubic splines, focusing on the case where the audio signal has recognizable fundamental frequency. These spline models of cycles are sampled in various ways to give a sequence of values which are used to define logarithmic pitch deviations from some chosen central pitch. Melodic fragments are constructed using cycles extacted from recorded wave forms, and these same cycles are also used to construct the tones of the melodic fragments as audio segments with given pitch and duration. In this way, the musical elements of pitch, duration, and timbre are captured in the context of spline modeling of cycles.