Computer Assisted Composition in Continuous Time

We address the problem of combining sequence models of symbolic music with user defined constraints. For typical models this is nontrivial as only the conditional distribu - tion of each symbol given the earlier symbols is available, while the constraints correspond to arbitrary times. Previ - ously this has been addressed by assuming a discrete time model of fixed rhythm. We generalise to continuous time and arbitrary rhythm by introducing a simple, novel, and efficie nt particle filter scheme, applicable to general continuous ti me point processes. Extensive experimental evaluations demo n-strate that in comparison with a more traditional beam searc h baseline, the particle filter exhibits superior statistica l properties and yields more agreeable results in an extensive human listening test experiment.