DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Priority
Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies of papers required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement(s) (IDS(s)) submitted on 6/8/2026 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Response to Amendment
Claims 1-2, 4-6, 8-9, 11-13, and 15 are pending and are addressed below. Claims 3, 7, 10, and 14 have been cancelled by Applicant.
Regarding amended claims 1, 4-6, 8, and 11-13 (and amended claims 2 and 9 by incorporation), the term “suitability score” appears nowhere in the original specification, and the specification discloses no computation, algorithm, or other implementation for producing such a score. Applicant has identified support for “suitability score” in instant fig. 4. In light of instant fig. 4, the term denotes a numeric value of suitability assigned for each candidate musical element. Note that the scope of “suitability score” is evaluated within its plain meaning to a POSITA, not inconsistent with the specification. (See MPEP § 2111.01.)
Response to Arguments
Applicant states on pages 10-11 that, “[a]s discussed during the interview and acknowledged [by] the Examiners, these features are not disclosed or suggested by Pati or any other prior art of record. During the Interview, the Examiners indicated further limiting the musical element sequence to a melody in the proposed amendment to claims 1 and 8, similarly to the proposed amendments to claim 15, would overcome the current prior art rejections.”
These remarks in Mr. Kimura’s arguments dated 8/21/2026 appear to be an unintentional mischaracterization of Examiners’ 8/3/2026 interview with Mr. Mickney. In the interview, the Examiners explained that 1) Regarding claims 1 and 8, the proposed amendments would defeat the existing 35 U.S.C. 102 rejections over Pati, and 2) Regarding claim 15, the proposed amendment to claim 15 would defeat the current 35 U.S.C. 102 rejection of that claim over Sun because Sun does not disclose a melody. Note that Pati, on the other hand, not only discloses melodies, but states in § 3.2 that “we restrict ourselves to 4/4 monophonic melodic sequences in this paper.”
In the interview, Examiners explicitly reserved the position that beyond the 102 references as applied, it may be found upon further examination that the remaining art of record teaches or reasonably suggests part or all of the proposed amendments, singly or in combination, and specifically encouraged Applicant to consider Minamitaka and Gozzi in full before finalizing the proposed amendments.
Applicant’s arguments regarding Gozzi, see page 11, filed 8/21/2026, with respect to canceled claim 3 or any other claims, have been considered but are moot because the new ground of rejection does not rely on any reference applied in the prior rejection of record for any teaching or matter specifically challenged in the argument.
In response to applicant's arguments against the references individually, one cannot show nonobviousness by attacking references individually where the rejections are based on combinations of references. See In re Keller, 642 F.2d 413, 208 USPQ 871 (CCPA 1981); In re Merck & Co., 800 F.2d 1091, 231 USPQ 375 (Fed. Cir. 1986).
Applicant’s arguments regarding Minamitaka, see pages 11-12, filed 8/21/2026, are directed at features mapped to other references. See the rejections on the merits below.
Applicant’s arguments regarding Sun, see pages 12-13, filed 8/21/2026, with respect to claim 15, have been considered but are moot because the new ground of rejection does not rely on any reference applied in the prior rejection of record for any teaching or matter specifically challenged in the argument.
Applicant's arguments regarding claims 2, 4-6, 9, and 11-13, see pages 13-14, filed 8/21/2026, do not comply with 37 CFR 1.111(c) because they do not clearly point out the patentable novelty which he or she thinks the claims present in view of the state of the art disclosed by the references cited or the objections made. Further, they do not show how the amendments avoid such references or objections.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim 15 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Pati.
Regarding claim 15, Pati discloses a musical element learning method comprising: acquiring a plurality of musical element sequences each of which is melody (Pati § 3.2: "While we restrict ourselves to 4/4 monophonic melodic sequences in this paper, the approach can be extended to other time signatures and polyphonic sequences as well.") and includes a plurality of musical elements arranged in a time series (Pati § 1: "Specifically, the task is to train models to fill in missing information in musical scores, duly taking into account the complete musical context — both past and future."); randomly setting a blank portion in a part of each of the musical element sequences (Pati § 3.4: "For each training batch, the number of measures to be inpainted ni and the number of measures in the past context np are randomly sampled from a uniform distribution."); and constructing a learning model indicating a relationship between at least one musical element and a musical element for a blank portion (Pati § 3.1: "given a past musical context Cp and a future musical context Cf, the modeling task is to generate an inpainted sequence Ci which can connect Cp and Cf in a musically meaningful manner. In other words, the model should be trained to maximize the likelihood p(Ci | Cp,Cf)."), by machine learning a relationship between at least one of the musical elements for the blank portion and at least one of the musical elements for a portion other than the blank portion in each of the musical element sequences (Pati § 3.4: "Using these, the input sequences are split into past, future and target sequences and the model is trained to predict the target sequence given the past and future context sequences. This stochastic training scheme ensures that the model learns to deal with variable length contexts and can perform inpaintings at arbitrary locations.").
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
Claims 1-2, 4-6, 8-9, and 11-13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as unpatentable over by Pati et al. ("Learning to Traverse Latent Spaces for Musical Score Inpainting," 2019, retrieved 4/10/2026 from https://musicinformatics.gatech.edu/wp-content_nondefault/uploads/2019/06/Pati-et-al.-2019-Learning-to-Traverse-Latent-Spaces-for-Musical-Sco.pdf), hereinafter Pati, in view of Aoki et al. (US 6252152 B1, June 26, 2001), hereinafter Aoki, and further in view of Minamitaka (US 20160148606 A1, May 26, 2016), hereinafter Minamitaka.
Regarding claim 1, Pati teaches a musical element generation support device comprising: at least one processor configured to receive a musical element sequence which is melody (Pati § 3.2: "While we restrict ourselves to 4/4 monophonic melodic sequences in this paper, the approach can be extended to other time signatures and polyphonic sequences as well.") and includes a plurality of musical elements and a blank portion that are arranged in a time series (Pati § 1: "Specifically, the task is to train models to fill in missing information in musical scores, duly taking into account the complete musical context — both past and future." A trained model inherently comprises at least one processor.), generate, by using a learning model (Pati § 4.2: "The MeasureVAE model was pre-trained using single measures following the standard VAE optimization equation [26] with the β-weighting scheme [41,42]."), a plurality of suitable musical elements that are suitable for the blank portion (Pati § 4.5: "One advantage of working with the latent space is that the sampling operation, inherent in the VAE inference process, ensures that for the same context we can get different inpainting results. Figure 8 shows three such generations for the context of Figure 7.") based on a part of the musical elements that is positioned after the blank portion (Pati § 4.4: "the second model, referred to as FutureInpaintNet considered only the future context Cf.") on a time axis in the musical element sequence (Pati § 3.1: "We define the score inpainting problem as follows: given a past musical context Cp and a future musical context Cf, the modeling task is to generate an inpainted sequence Ci which can connect Cp and Cf in a musically meaningful manner."), the learning model being configured to generate, from one-part musical element, another-part musical element (Pati fig. 2 caption: "The pre-trained MeasureVAE encoder is used to convert the past and future context sequences (Cp and Cf) into their respective latent vector sequences (Zp and Zf). The LatentRNN learns to traverse the latent space of MeasureVAE to output a latent vector sequence Zi which is passed through the pre-trained decoder to output the inpainted musical sequence Ci.").
Pati does not explicitly disclose: evaluate the plurality of suitable musical elements for the blank portion to generate suitability scores of the plurality of suitable musical elements.
However, Aoki teaches or suggests: evaluate the plurality of suitable musical elements for the blank portion (Aoki col. 14, lines 42-50: "The melody pitches of one measure thus generated are evaluated in terms of musical requirements that are a little more strict than the above conditions (namely, it is determined whether the melody pitches also satisfy such composition conditions and musical rules that are not included in the conditions under which the pitch of each tone-generation point was determined), and the generated melody pitches for one measure are adopted if they satisfy the musical requirements." Aoki teaches a device-generated evaluation step on melody pitches. This teaching, in combination with that of Pati above, would reasonably encompass evaluating Pati's blank portions.).
Furthermore, Minamitaka teaches or suggests: to generate suitability scores of the plurality of suitable musical elements (Minamitaka ¶0208: "the CPU 1401 divides the value of the variable data item iTotalValue by the number (iNoteCnt-2) of processed notes of the input motif 108, thereby performing normalization, and stores the division result, as the matching level of No. n chord progression for the input motif 108, in the variable data item doValue." Minamitaka ¶0130: "These data item sets correspond to Nos. 0, 1, and 2 chord progression candidate indication data items 109 of FIG. 1, sequentially from the top ranking." Minamitaka generates numeric, per-candidate scores that reflect suitability of melody-to-chord chord matching.).
It would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the musical element generation support device of Pati by adding the evaluation of Aoki and the suitability scores of Minamitaka to quantify the correspondence relation between melody and chord progression to appropriately select musical elements (Minamitaka ¶0278).
Regarding claim 2, Pati (in view of Aoki and further in view of Minamitaka) teaches a musical element generation support device comprising the features of claim 1 as discussed above.
Pati further teaches that the at least one processor is configured to generate, by using the learning model, the plurality of suitable musical elements for the blank portion based further on a part of the musical elements that is positioned before the blank portion on the time axis in the musical element sequence (Pati § 1: "Specifically, the task is to train models to fill in missing information in musical scores, duly taking into account the complete musical context — both past and future.").
Regarding claim 4, Pati (in view of Aoki and further in view of Minamitaka) teaches a musical element generation support device comprising the features of claim 1 as discussed above.
Minamitaka further teaches or suggests that the at least one processor is further configured to present only a prescribed number of the plurality of suitable musical elements in order of the suitability scores (Minamitaka ¶0042: "With respect to each of a plurality of chord progression data items retained in the accompaniment/chord-progression DB 103, the chord-progression selecting unit 102 calculates the matching level representing how much the corresponding chord progression data item is suitable for the input motif 108 input from the motif input unit 101 while referring to the rule DB 104, and outputs, for example, Nos. 0, 1, and 2 chord progression candidate indication data items (each of which is referred to as ;CHORD PROGRESSION CANDIDATE' in FIG. 1) 109 indicating chord progression data items of the top three matching levels, respectively.").
It would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the musical element generation support device of Pati (as modified by Aoki and Minamitaka) by adding the ordering and filtering of choices of Minamitaka to partially optimize the system and make the selection easier for the user to control (Minamitaka ¶0007).
Regarding claim 5, Pati (in view of Aoki and further in view of Minamitaka) teaches a musical element generation support device comprising the features of claim 1 as discussed above.
Minamitaka further teaches or suggests that the at least one processor is further configured to present, from among the plurality of suitable musical elements (Minamitaka ¶0043: "The melody generating unit 105 prompts, for example, the user to select one of three chord progression candidates corresponding to Nos. 0, 1, and 2 chord progression candidate indication data items 109 output from the chord-progression selecting unit 102. Alternatively, the melody generating unit 105 may automatically select a chord progression candidate corresponding to any one of Nos. 0, 1, and 2 chord progression candidate indication data items 109, in turns.")
Aoki further teaches or suggest at least one suitable musical element having a higher suitability score than a prescribed suitability score (Aoki col. 21, lines 32-25: "In FIG. 9, the number of non-chord tones in the current measure is detected, and the frequency (%) of non-chord tones relative to all tone-generation points in this measure is calculated in step S81.").
It would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the musical element generation support device of Pati (as modified by Aoki and Minamitaka) by adding the presentation of Minamitaka and the at least one musical element having a higher suitability score than a prescribed suitability score of Aoki to select candidates having the highest matching level (Minamitaka ¶0043).
Regarding claim 6, Pati (in view of Aoki and further in view of Minamitaka) teaches a musical element generation support device comprising the features of claim 1 as discussed above.
Minamitaka further teaches or suggests that the at least one processor is further configured to select, from among the plurality of suitable musical elements, a suitable musical element with a highest suitability score (Minamitaka ¶0093: "If a chord progression candidate is selected from three chord progression candidates corresponding to Nos. 0, 1, and 2 chord progression candidate indication data items 109 output from the chord-progression selecting unit 102 by user's designation or having the highest matching level, the melody generating unit 105 of FIG. 1 reads a music structure data item (see FIG. 6) corresponding to the selected chord progression candidate, from the accompaniment/chord-progression DB 103.").
It would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the musical element generation support device of Pati (as modified by Aoki and Minamitaka) by adding the selection of a musical element with a highest suitability score of Minamitaka to select candidates having the highest matching level (Minamitaka ¶0043).
Regarding claim 8, Pati teaches a musical element generation support method comprising: receiving a musical element sequence which is melody (Pati § 3.2: "While we restrict ourselves to 4/4 monophonic melodic sequences in this paper, the approach can be extended to other time signatures and polyphonic sequences as well.") and includes a plurality of musical elements and a blank portion that are arranged in a time series (Pati § 1: "Specifically, the task is to train models to fill in missing information in musical scores, duly taking into account the complete musical context — both past and future." A trained model inherently comprises at least one processor.); generating a plurality of musical elements that are suitable for the blank portion (Pati § 4.5: "One advantage of working with the latent space is that the sampling operation, inherent in the VAE inference process, ensures that for the same context we can get different inpainting results. Figure 8 shows three such generations for the context of Figure 7.") based on a part of the musical elements that is positioned after the blank portion (Pati § 4.4: "the second model, referred to as FutureInpaintNet considered only the future context Cf.") on a time axis in the musical element sequence (Pati § 3.1: "We define the score inpainting problem as follows: given a past musical context Cp and a future musical context Cf, the modeling task is to generate an inpainted sequence Ci which can connect Cp and Cf in a musically meaningful manner."), by using a learning model configured to generate, from one-part musical element, another-part musical element (Pati fig. 2 caption: "The pre-trained MeasureVAE encoder is used to convert the past and future context sequences (Cp and Cf) into their respective latent vector sequences (Zp and Zf). The LatentRNN learns to traverse the latent space of MeasureVAE to output a latent vector sequence Zi which is passed through the pre-trained decoder to output the inpainted musical sequence Ci.").
Pati does not explicitly disclose evaluating the plurality of suitable musical elements for the blank portion to generate suitability scores of the plurality of suitable musical elements.
However, Aoki teaches or suggests: evaluating the plurality of suitable musical elements for the blank portion (Aoki col. 14, lines 42-50: "The melody pitches of one measure thus generated are evaluated in terms of musical requirements that are a little more strict than the above conditions (namely, it is determined whether the melody pitches also satisfy such composition conditions and musical rules that are not included in the conditions under which the pitch of each tone-generation point was determined), and the generated melody pitches for one measure are adopted if they satisfy the musical requirements." Aoki teaches a device-generated evaluation step on melody pitches. This teaching, in combination with that of Pati above, would reasonably encompass evaluating Pati's blank portions.).
Furthermore, Minamitaka teaches or suggests: to generate suitability scores of the plurality of suitable musical elements (Minamitaka ¶0208: "the CPU 1401 divides the value of the variable data item iTotalValue by the number (iNoteCnt-2) of processed notes of the input motif 108, thereby performing normalization, and stores the division result, as the matching level of No. n chord progression for the input motif 108, in the variable data item doValue." Minamitaka ¶0130: "These data item sets correspond to Nos. 0, 1, and 2 chord progression candidate indication data items 109 of FIG. 1, sequentially from the top ranking." Minamitaka generates numeric, per-candidate scores that reflect suitability of melody-to-chord chord matching.).
It would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the musical element generation support method of Pati by adding the evaluation of Aoki and the suitability scores of Minamitaka to quantify the correspondence relation between melody and chord progression to appropriately select musical elements (Minamitaka ¶0278).
Regarding claim 9, Pati (in view of Aoki and further in view of Minamitaka) teaches a musical element generation support method comprising the features of claim 8 as discussed above.
Pati further teaches that the generating is performed, by using the learning model, based further on a part of the musical elements that is positioned before the blank portion on the time axis in the musical element sequence (Pati § 1: "Specifically, the task is to train models to fill in missing information in musical scores, duly taking into account the complete musical context — both past and future.").
Regarding claim 11, Pati (in view of Aoki and further in view of Minamitaka) teaches a musical element generation support method comprising the features of claim 8 as discussed above.
Minamitaka further teaches or suggests that presenting only a prescribed number of the plurality of suitable musical elements in order of the suitability scores (Minamitaka ¶0042: "With respect to each of a plurality of chord progression data items retained in the accompaniment/chord-progression DB 103, the chord-progression selecting unit 102 calculates the matching level representing how much the corresponding chord progression data item is suitable for the input motif 108 input from the motif input unit 101 while referring to the rule DB 104, and outputs, for example, Nos. 0, 1, and 2 chord progression candidate indication data items (each of which is referred to as “CHORD PROGRESSION CANDIDATE” in FIG. 1) 109 indicating chord progression data items of the top three matching levels, respectively.").
It would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the musical element generation support method of Pati (as modified by Aoki and Minamitaka) by adding the ordering and filtering of choices of Minamitaka to partially optimize the system and make the selection easier for the user to control (Minamitaka ¶0007).
Regarding claim 12, Pati (in view of Aoki and Minamitaka) teaches a musical element generation support method comprising the features of claim 8 as discussed above.
Minamitaka further teaches or suggests that presenting, from among the plurality of suitable musical elements (Minamitaka ¶0043: "The melody generating unit 105 prompts, for example, the user to select one of three chord progression candidates corresponding to Nos. 0, 1, and 2 chord progression candidate indication data items 109 output from the chord-progression selecting unit 102. Alternatively, the melody generating unit 105 may automatically select a chord progression candidate corresponding to any one of Nos. 0, 1, and 2 chord progression candidate indication data items 109, in turns.")
Aoki further teaches or suggest at least one suitable musical element having a higher suitability score than a prescribed suitability score (Aoki col. 21, lines 32-25: "In FIG. 9, the number of non-chord tones in the current measure is detected, and the frequency (%) of non-chord tones relative to all tone-generation points in this measure is calculated in step S81.").
It would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the musical element generation support method of Pati (as modified by Aoki and Minamitaka) by adding the presentation of Minamitaka and the at least one musical element having a higher suitability score than a prescribed suitability score of Aoki to select candidates having the highest matching level (Minamitaka ¶0043).
Regarding claim 13, Pati (in view of Aoki and Minamitaka) teaches a musical element generation support method comprising the features of claim 8 as discussed above.
Minamitaka further teaches or suggests that selecting, from among the plurality of suitable musical elements, a suitable musical element with a highest suitability score (Minamitaka ¶0093: "If a chord progression candidate is selected from three chord progression candidates corresponding to Nos. 0, 1, and 2 chord progression candidate indication data items 109 output from the chord-progression selecting unit 102 by user's designation or having the highest matching level, the melody generating unit 105 of FIG. 1 reads a music structure data item (see FIG. 6) corresponding to the selected chord progression candidate, from the accompaniment/chord-progression DB 103.").
It would have been prima facie obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the musical element generation support method of Pati (as modified by Aoki and Minamitaka) by adding the selection of a musical element with a highest suitability score of Minamitaka to select candidates having the highest matching level (Minamitaka ¶0043).
Conclusion
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to PHILIP SCOLES whose telephone number is (703)756-1831. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 8:30-4:30 ET.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Dedei Hammond can be reached on 571-270-7938. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/PHILIP G SCOLES/
Examiner, Art Unit 2837
/DEDEI K HAMMOND/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2837
