Melody Blending: A Review and an Experiment

The blending of two melodies into a third is a creative process useful for exploring a search space and can be employed in compositional or improvisational tasks. Two melodic blend tropes are considered: hybridiza­tion (recombination of features) and morphing (generation of intermediate feature values). After reviewing the approaches that have been used to this end, a bespoke implementation of common methods for both tropes is undertaken, and excerpts demonstrating some use case scenarios are provided. A set of evaluation metrics is then put forward and selected blending modes are tested accordingly in a melodic blending task, for comparison.