How Generative Music Works

by isp • 8 years ago

161 33 8 years ago

isp2• 8 years ago

I heard about this via John Arundel @bitfield: https://twitter.com/bitfield/status/956167710156746752

This is genuinely amazing, not just for the content, which is excellent, but it's also one of the most innovative websites I've seen

SwellJoe3• 8 years ago

I enjoyed the presentation but genuinely hated the website. Like, on a deep and personal level. I'm a little bit mad about how bad the experience of using this website is. There were several pages where I had no idea if I was waiting for something to finish loading, or if I was supposed to hit space to continue (I'm on a slow/unreliable 4G connection...I often have this problem, but I can usually figure out what's happening based on surrounding content and commmonly used affordances that hint at what actions are available and when). I know it's one-key navigation, very simple and seemingly impossible to get wrong, but because it's frequently loading large files, I frequently was in limbo about what to do (though by the end I stopped waiting and just started trusting it would do something if it had something to do...this ended up skipping at least a couple of things that I think would have been musical or interactive or something had I waited for them).

If this subject weren't really of interest to me, I would have noped out within a couple of pages.

dkersten2• 8 years ago

Additionally to what you said, I find the prezi-style panning and movement between pages extremely distracting and jarring to the point where I did nope out.

lifeformed2• 8 years ago

It'd be way better if there was a way to go back.

venuur• 8 years ago

The website was unusable for me. I find the topic super interesting, but it’s not worth the extra time to parse. Not the least of which is that on mobile the font sizes were strange and the text poorly placed. Edit: typos.

isp2• 8 years ago

A few selected examples:

- "Trams of Helsinki" https://teropa.info/loop/#/tramsofhelsinki ("The trams are playing a pentatonic scale, mapped to central Helsinki")

- "Music Mouse": https://teropa.info/loop/#/musicmouse

- "Markov Player": https://teropa.info/loop/#/markovplayer

chii• 8 years ago

the music mouse is really cool - it doesn't sound generated or repetitive at all too!

adamnemecek• 8 years ago

To be honest I never found these things to be anything more than a curiosity. I'm yet to see a system that produces music that I would call "good".

confounded2• 8 years ago

I felt like this for a long time, but I've come to appreciate it as background/zoning-out music, especially when I'm familiar with the algorithm. I often become quite amazed how a small amount of PRNG can generate interesting melodies, and things which feel emotionally salient.

unrealornament• 8 years ago

Like a deck of cards, it is the same no matter how it is shuffled.

pmoriarty• 8 years ago

"I'm yet to see a system that produces music that I would call 'good'."

This is really in the eye of the beholder. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

There's plenty of incredibly popular music created by humans that I absolutely detest, compared to which computer-generated music (as boring, random, or predictable as it might be) can't possibly be any worse.

For my own personal taste, it's rare that completely computer-generated music sounds "good" to me, but it happens. Here's an example, from one of David Cope's EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence): [1]

When we depart from strictly and completely computer-generated music to music that contains some generative elements which are "curated" or guided by humans, to my taste the music gets much better. Then we get in to the realm of what could be termed human-computer collaboration.

I like Brian Eno's analogy of "composer as gardener", in which the composer may plant musical seeds and then guide the music to fruition, while not controlling or being the "author" of every nuance as happens with more traditional views of composition.[2]

[1] - ftp://arts.ucsc.edu/pub/cope/beet2.mp3

[2] https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-composers-as-gar...

rev_null• 8 years ago

I actually have a musical project I call Intercal which is based on the idea of obfuscating well known musical works algorithmically. It generally takes a lot of attempts to find something that works, but I've had some promising results.

https://m.soundcloud.com/revjohnnyhealey/sets/intercal

https://revjohnnyhealey.bandcamp.com/album/obfuscated-x-mas

TheOtherHobbes• 8 years ago

Eno’s analogy is good PR, but makes no sense at all when you consider the rigidity of the technology involved, and the fact that it’s literally incapable of evolving new forms.[1]

In fact algorithmic music is exactly what it appears to be - the design of relatively trivial mechanistic automata that generate notes and/or sound.

[1] Yes, genetic algos have been used in algorithimc music. No, they haven’t been any more succesful aesthetically than other approaches - possibly because all algo approaches seem to have a simplistic view of the domain, and if you’re stuck in that local minimum it doesn’t matter which algos you use.

andybak• 8 years ago

I genuinely enjoy Steve Reich's Piano Phase and have listened to it many times.

confounded2• 8 years ago

I've recently been messing with very simple generative music with sonic-pi[0], a Ruby DSL which makes things very easy. It's been great fun, and you can get up and running very quickly. Here's the source code for some pretty listenable (IMO) generative music of infinite length[1]. Being able to read source-code comments to something while listening to it is strangely satisfying.

[0] https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi

[1] https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/blob/master/etc/example...

brianyu8• 8 years ago

In b flat: http://www.inbflat.net/

fenomas5• 8 years ago

If anyone's interested in more examples, I spent last month doing a "thing a day" bunch of procedural music experiments with Web Audio. A couple of the ones that seemed to work:

* tries to create a semi-randomized fugue: http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-18/

* jazz combo improvising over the title theme from Metroid: http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-16/

* generates a chiptune over the progression of Autumn Leaves: http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-17/

Caveat, they're likely too CPU-intensive for mobile devices.

pieterk• 8 years ago

Love your autumn chiptune! Is the project open source? It would be amazing to be able to play around with its parameters.

fenomas5• 8 years ago

Thank you! I wish I could say there was a cohesive thing with tunable parameters inside those demos, but basically each of them is a separate blob of ad-hoc ways of choosing scales, rhythmic patterns, etc.

The modular bit, which is reused across all the demos, is the bit that actually plays noises through Web Audio, and might be worth checking out: https://github.com/andyhall/soundgen

(If it's not obvious, there aren't any pre-made audio samples in the demos, all the noises are built at runtime out of Web Audio oscillators and filters and so on, inside that library.)

Mateon1• 8 years ago

I took a look at other days of your musical advent. I think my favorite is day 23.

Day 4 strongly reminds me of the True Lab music from the Undertale soundtrack [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y49b8aiQVBg - Undertale OST: 83 - Here We Are

fenomas5• 8 years ago

Thanks! You are spot on about day 4 - most of the demos began with trying to imitate an existing track, especially structural stuff like how many voices there are, how often they enter and leave, how often the chords change, etc.

sxp• 8 years ago

Very nice. I really like your chiptunes on days 15 & 17.

bringtheaction• 8 years ago

Caveat, they're likely too CPU-intensive for mobile devices.

Mobile user here. Would love to be able to listen -- could you make recordings of the generated music and put up links to audio files?

nukenuke• 8 years ago

here's some more generative (improvised?) music: https://www.youtube.com/user/ahsax (made with homemade software + sax improvising + logic pro)

aimeric• 8 years ago

Aside: I'm glad to see that (so far) no one's referred to it as Krell music.

This is a reference to the 1956 science fiction movie 'Forbidden Planet' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet), which was the first film to use an entirely electronic score, created by husband-and-wife team Louis and Bebe Barron.

The timbres ('electronic tonalities') were generated using rather fascinating vacuum tube circuits. Bebe Barron used these as the basis for her compositions.

The soundtrack superficially appears to consist of weird, unstructured, synthetic sounds. The film's music and sound effects intermingle. But there certainly is a musical structure; it's not just randomly generated sound.

Unfortunately, some electronic musicians generate random sequences or noises and call it 'Krell' music. It's a fundamental (lazy?) misunderstanding of what the Barrons achieved without the use of synthesizers.

tw1010• 8 years ago

I want to reduce how much time I spend on the internet, but it's awesome stuff like this that keeps me coming back.

dvfjsdhgfv• 8 years ago

Great work, thank you!

How Generative Music Works

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