Classical papers in Computer Music: Dannenberg and the real-time musical accompaniment

In this talk we will present Roger Dannenberg's paper entitled "An On-Line Algorithm for Real-Time Accompaniment" (ICMC 1984). The author presents a new approach to the real-time musical accompaniment problem in which the computer has the ability to follow a solo musician. Three sub-problems are considered: process the input from the soloist in real-time (using symbolic code), compare this entry with the original score (using a matching algorithm) and generate the accompaniment in accordance with the musician's progress (using a virtual clock). The paper's highlight is the use of a well-known dynamic programming algorithm for the input/original score matching.