I’m a huge fan of game jams which force you to create something fun and playable in a short period of time. For years now I’ve used tools like Sfxr which generates 8-bit sound effects based on predefined templates. When I started developing my fantasy game console, Pixel Vision 8, I wanted to see if I could build upon Sfxr and create randomly generated music for those of us that know nothing about musical composition. To do this, I employed a collection of techniques to help teach my software how to make “good” music randomly based on a set of predefined musical styles.

In this talk, I’ll walk you through how PV8’s music generator works, what it’s capable of doing, and how I plan to leverage machine learning to help take it to the next level.