The PID controller is the most commonly used industrial controller due to its good performance and ease of implementation. The controller performance mostly depends on tuning, which requires selecting appropriate values for the controller parameters: controller gain, reset time and derivative time to reach a tradeoff between performance and reliability. The tuning process can be tedious and time consuming. In this study, we use an optimization algorithm based on Harmony Search to automatically select the controller parameters which minimizes our predefined objective function. Different to the commonly used objective functions to evaluate the controller performance, both the controller output and rise time are put in the objective function to penalize the possible over control. And in order to avoid over tuning, the difference of system outputs between the current time instant and previous one is also a part of our objective function. The newly obtained result will be compared with the ones obtained by using the conventional PID techniques to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new method