Intelligent tools for deliberate music practice: evolving targeted sight reading exercises

The work presented in this thesis primarily aims to consider the opportunities for developing digital applications which enable user's deliberate practice of musical skills, specifically musical sight reading. It also seeks to model an example of such an application and validate its effectiveness against existing solutions and standard practice. By applying evolutionary techniques this application generates practice material that is aesthetically pleasing, adaptive in difficulty, can incorporate specific technical skills, and is playable by a human. This overcomes the resource constraint presented by traditional practice materials, which are expensive to produce and limited in quantity.