I don't know anything about acid techno. Can someone comment on how accurate this is to the genre? I can't seem to get it to do much but make random beeps and boops, but maybe that's just the style of music?
This is pretty much how it sounds - the particular synthesizer and tweaking its parameters (resonance, filtering, and so on) is the main defining feature, the particular classic drum machine used typically goes along with it - but there’s a lot more variation you can do besides just slowly modulating it like this program does, as well as crossovers to other genres (using that squeaky synth sound in other genres of electronic music).
This anxiety inducing song by Evol basically switches between samples of different acid tracks every other beat, serves as a nice primer for how you can vary it lol
Thanks for the examples. I can see why this website is so impressive now, it sounds pretty spot on to the samples! That's absolutely mind blowing to me.
This is a good algorithmic approximation of the quality of 50-80% of sub-professional acid techno live sets. It's a great minimum bar for "should you be performing live": you should at least be more interesting than this webpage of random patterns and sweeps.
To be honest, I'm going to leave this playing a lot. This is an extremely representative sample of a very specific minimal style, one I love a lot.
Making interesting music of other genres is a lot more difficult to do algorithmically. One of the big perks of acid techno (a pair of TB-303s and a TR-808 or TR-909 drum machine, and some simple effects processors) is how easy it is to get really interesting sounding stuff out of random patterns and simple filter sweeps.
I will also vouch for and throw my 2¢ in for DI.fm. I've been subscribed since 2014 and while I have my qualms (namely a few stations that haven't seen a playlist change since I signed up, or their somewhat recent attempt to switch to a playlist-based setup instead of internet radio), it's a top-notch service that continues to please.
WOW! I had absolutely no idea about these, my DI.FM credentials (Google sign-in) worked flawlessly and registers my premium subscription.
> I rarely visit their website as they allow you to save your favourite stations as a play list for your preferred media player.
Agreed 100%, plus the ability to choose the stream quality for your playlist-stations is an added bonus, not even mentioning the hardware player support. It feels rare anymore to have a quality, reasonably-priced, bloat-free service with user-friendly features, but they seriously deliver
I remember installing ReBirth on my PC many years ago, and so amazed that it can emulate two whole friggin' TB303 analog machines, with a 909 drum kit too, just using the CPU. Which was pegged to 99% during playback.
And here we are today, the same thing is running in my browser and taking 2% CPU.
Propellerhead, right? I remember opening Reason for the first time (I had no experience with music hardware) and was completely lost. I played around with knobs for a long time trying to make sounds with limited luck. Then I clicked something and the entire rack flipped around and there were patch cables hanging there that I could plug anywhere. I think I plugged things into different holes, the one sound I had going stopped, then I quit the program :)
I eventually ended up reading the manual and getting the hang of it. My friend turned me on to it, and he had it mastered. He produced house music and frequently toured the world with Mark Farina back in the day.
Haha, this was my experience with Cubase. Then one day, I came into a music shop complaining about Cubase. The guy showed me how to hook up a simple VSTi, and I was hooked. I discovered Reason soon after.
Then there was this Dutch House DJ, A-lusion (I think that was his name). He said he used Reason in combination with Cubase.
That got me really really hooked.
Then I found some videos of some hip hop artist, showing how he made hip hop beats in Reason.
That got me so hooked that I still want to go back to that time. But alas, I'm programming. I like programming, but producing music was my passion back in the day.
I was in sane boat until I found a pirated version of a tutorial that took me through creating a house track from scratch. Brilliant fun. Total waste of my time though!
Rebirth was discontinued and released for free download in the Rebirth Museum, if you can find a genuine copy I think it still works on Windows 7 and Mac OS 9.
One of the things that's cool about 2020 and 2021 is getting to experience things that were mostly forgotten relics of the past as very real experiences today. I never thought I'd go to a real speakeasy (not a gimmicky cocktail bar with a password or hidden door). Illegal raves in the woods have always remained a thing, but have gotten a bit of extra cachet this last year.
Also worth following on Soundcloud for old school jungle, with lots of mixes from back in the day: https://soundcloud.com/ethereal94. The ones from "KOOL - 94.5FM" (straight out of Clapton) are well worth listening to.
Wow, excellent execution. I listen to a lot of acid and am amazed how good this sounds. Great way to discover interesting patterns for further music making as well I can imagine; how would that work with copyright though?
I love acid music, such a simple formula with infinite variation. There's something so delicious about the wobble of a 303 bassline.
I just want to mention Tin Man for those who are interested in acid. He writes, mostly, quite palatable (often mournful) tunes at house music tempo, but he has a good range and goes full banger at times. A real wizard with a heart for the genre.
Also. Rashad Becker masters most of the Dozzy's and Tin Man works. Very betufiful mastering work: so mellow, so clear and spacious. Take a listen of Donato Dozzy - K album on a good system, you'll hear so many details and beautiful spatial placement.
Right! I'm familiar with Donato Dozzy and their collaborations, it's a match made in heaven. I need to chase down a copy of his K album on vinyl, it's lovely.
This generates much better patterns than any other music web project I've tried. Awesome work.
If you had no music experience, snuck into a club, impersonated a DJ, and just pressed play on this, I think even without touching it, no one would notice anything's amiss. If you messed around with it occasionally, you'd probably get hired back. (And that's a compliment to the app; definitely not a diss of acid techno.)
I mean I don't even know if people actually listen to acid or if it's a genre of music that online projects like this seem to latch on to. I don't recall (but I'm pretty insular) it being a thing anywhere.
Trance/dance music, sure. I guess acid is a subgenre?
That tiled room gets me through the workday. In that ilk: Fear n Loathing. Art of Minimal. Trippy Cat Music. Beamer. A bit further from that sound but still great for coding: Cercle, Radio Intense, Cafe de Anatolia.
Yes it's a subgenre, and yes it's a thing and has been for a couple of decades. And it even has its own subgenres/'mixins' like acidcore or goa with acid influences (not sure that one has a name).
I like this genre, but I don't find this generated music satisfying. My brain is anticipating some 'rule of three', which I don't feel it's following and I therefore feel disappointment.
I'm expecting it to switch an established pattern up (more than it does) on the third repeat, just as I get used to it, and to have fractal-like layers of patterns, which I didn't observe.
I agree. This is a very cool project, mainly because the actual synth sounds are good, so it sounds like a legitimate live acid musician hitting the good old "randomize" button on their 303 clone, but it still sounds a bit like a carefully managed "randomize".
I think what makes it work for people is that it evokes that kind of IDM-ish hipster acid music where hearing something a bit unmusical without a 4-to-the-floor "release" is acceptable. But I'm not sure this system would have as much luck putting together an actual "acid banger" like Lochi's London Acid City, Purple Plejade's Blanche, Hardfloor's Acperience etc.
The problem is that a computer can't know when it really came up with a "banger" of a sequence. When you have a real musician, they can sense when a particular sequence really "clicks" for people, somehow it just accents in places that sound cool. Then they can move ahead with that sequence, tease it and build it and bring it to resolution. This is the holy grail of generated music, I think, to somehow get a computer to a place where it can recognize whatever that quality is.
I doubt it. Perhaps you were lucky with the piece you listened to, but I checked it for 5 minutes and the off-beat things it generates are pretty much unheard of in this genre. Not that there's no off-beat produced by humans, but it doesn't sound anything like this. Simply because what the machine is doing here brakes the rhythm too much, making it harder to dance on, and after all that's what this music is for.
I think you were unlucky, actually. I've been playing around with it on and off for a few hours now and sometimes it gets locked into the behaviour you describe, but for the most part it's very standard 4/4.
Yeah I checked again and there's definitely more 'standard' acid in there. Now it's just waiting until someone records it and posts it as being theirs :)
The whole Miku Hatsune[0] phenomenon has the front end of this idea. If someone combines something like OP (which is the 2nd best classical algorithmic music project I've listened to) with some musical AI like Jukebox[1], most of the back end would be done.
The missing parts would be the choreography and visual design. I also wouldn't personally say it's done unless it is marketing itself. At which point we are in singularity territory.
This is a rant, from someone who's been playing music for 3 decades, rock, electronic, and classical. Also I've been meditating a lot. I started realizing recently the huge separation between thoughts about music and music itself, just as there is between thoughts and action. The world we live in, of temporary digital media, is a mirror of our thought processes. Our whole modern day and environs are spent in thoughts and media, with almost no action... particularly since we started working at home and ordering food in!
Upon seeing a web page's "impressionistic interpretation/reduction" of a decade or so of music driven primarily by economic and social constraints (warehouse techno), it's so easy for people to pile up thoughts. It's so inexpensive and risk-free for people to say, "oh yeah, that there is good techno/acid," without trying it out on a dancefloor, without having listened to hours and hours of it.
There has strangely been a long-term dream of computer scientists to replace composition. To "spit out" songs as someone put it. It's usually too scary to ask ourselves "why?" because it usually is a game of validating one's own mind against others' impressions. For some reason, auto-composition seems like some kind of holy grail, but of what?! Saving money buying music? A fantasy of abundance? A kind of "gotcha!" that a pure thought-person has outwitted a silly irl composer? What do you actually get for creating an intelligence that wins a Turing test? You certainly don't get sweaty friends deliriously dancing on drugs at 3 am. You typically just get another social promotion in the direction of aiding greater powers at their control over the world. Is that what it's about? Closing ourselves off from human musical expression in exchange for increased financial standing? Get a job bc you proved you can fool some of them of the time? To validate a work ethic that regards music as frivolous by demonstrating that it can be simulated accurately enough?
It's not obvious that every decent musical piece is a more complex and interesting story than its notes. That every new synthesis engine can only ever interpolate its inputs as opposed to incorporate new ideas and more importantly experiences. Experiences that relate to a person and group. We all have a sublime attraction to the story of Beethoven - to having been giving a profound gift and slowly lost part of it. We look for ourselves in his work, where did he break down? How did he handle his unfortunate circumstances?
We perceive music in terms of passion - what it cost an individual in hours of life, blisters, health, money, dedication, etc. We revere Kurt Cobain for pouring out everything he had into his music. If a computer program wrote "You Know You're Right," and we knew there wasn't actually someone real who "never failed to feel....PAAAAAAAAIN," it wouldn't matter to us. Because we're all diffractions of some crazy spiritual force no one understands, but it seems like music is a form of "interdigiation" between us. So why plug our own listening energy into a random number generator and call it good? With respect to ppl saying, "now we can have acid anywhere, anytime," I say, "dial up great mixes on youtube, etc." There are real DJs who put together songs in streams that have even greater meanings than the individual songs - bc, again, music is more than just individuals, it's a collective act.
And no matter what the tech of the day is, it will always be applied as if it were to be the "final," perfect means of autocomposing - remember fractal music in the 90s? PCA synthesis in the early 2000s? So as a fun programming challenge, i say to people, sure, write these programs. But why must we persist in proclaiming their relevance to our active lives when they only resonate in our thoughts.
I think you have a point that there is a certain type of music fan that really does want to make a human connection with the artist through the music, and algorithmic composition may never really be enough for those fans.
But it's also the case that one of the things that makes electronic music appealing to a lot of people is that it generally doesn't have the cult of personality that exists in other genres. For sure, some parts of the scene ended up idolizing DJs instead, but I'd say a significant subset of techno fans are specifically not interested in the artistic motivation behind a piece and are instead just looking to hear some cool sounds.
That's why electronic music is a great place to experiment with algorithmic composition, and that's why all these people joking about ravers dancing to washing machines because they're so drugged up kinda missed the point of what we liked about the music in the first place. It's not about telling a story, or communicating an emotion, it's just about creating a cool sound. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that. If a piece of machinery can create a cool sound incidentally, why wouldn't we dance to it?
Of course, as I commented elsewhere, I don't think this particular example is especially notable. The music it generates is not much more interesting than what you'd get if you anyway just hit a "random pattern" button on a 303 clone that lets you constrain the result to a scale. But that doesn't matter, because it's still a nifty project and a bit of fun.
If you really are searching for the true intent of the artist, then you have that with algorithmic composition too. Click round the rest of this developer/artist's site and you'll find lots of little projects and experiments with music and software creations that - even if you don't see them as art, are at the very least the product of a creative hobbyist. There's your passion!
> What do you actually get for creating an intelligence that wins a Turing test?
> it's just about creating a cool sound.
I specifically want to create novel hard/dark/minimal techno bangers with similar effort to curating a playlist.
I want a toy that makes music that will keep me and my friends up into the wee hours, without the toil, without the bleeding egoic labor.
And I want people with good taste to have the same ability without putting thousands of hours into learning music theory and arcane details about DAWs and synthesizers and other... Traditional... Tools.
I want to twist the nips of a sexy thump machine and get a good feedback loop[0] going between jerky knees and the stupid-smart NPC musician in my laptop.
I want to spend the night in a tent with eyes that digests my tribe with its acid colors and plays us like so many marionettes until, exhausted, we cut the power and go home. And there wasn't a Guru making it happen, no Chad waiting his turn on the deck, just sound, lightning, and loving this f'n party, man.
The other points about writing songs that express humanity, and the inventor's hubris and all that hit the mark. But deleting the boundary between bedroom production and the rave itself... I'd be hard pressed to imagine anything more fun and exciting.
I get what you're saying, but in my opinion the general line of thought sounds a tad too pessimistic or maybe even fatalistic. Perhaps drivent by recent pandemic events? In short: I don't think that one or more people making music, live or otherwise, and others joining to enjoy/dance/go-wild/pick-your-poison on that music is ever going to disappear.
I think I'm interpreting algorithmic composition in a different way than you are. I am someone who has always been profoundly affected by music. This is to the point where some songs consistently give me frision or make my eyes water up. Music, for me, is a profoundly emotional experience. I was just never very good at creating music; that is, until a few years ago.
I got into making music using DAWs and learned a lot of theory. I focus on making Synthwave/Outrun style music. Not the most technically complex genre sure, but there is a lot of room for creativity as the genre isn't very well defined. I also enjoy how Synthwave isn't really about musical complexity or technicality; instead, it's about the atmosphere. It's nostalgia for a time that never existed in a sense.
Now, all of this to say that I'm still not a great musician. I've been learning banjo for the past year, and getting pretty good at it.
I'll get to the point though: to me, algorithmic music isn't an end, it's a means to an end. The end in this case is composing music. Algorithmic music can be a source of ideas and inspiration in a way that nothing else can. This is especially true if we are able to specify the rule set for music generation. How many times have I sat down at the keyboard and tried to write a melody over some really cool rhythmic bass line I came up with? Countless times. If I could, for example, plug in the a key, rhythmic signature and feeling I'm going for and generate a melody, I would be able to finish more songs. I could use the generated melody as a starting point; it might spark some new ideas. This would be even cooler if I could provide the algorithm with a wav file or some midi and have it try to generate a bass line, melody, chord progression etc.
So, I guess I see algorithmic music generation less as something to replace human made music and more as a tool to aid in sparking creativity in humans composing music.
3am and really dancing.. not just doing repetitive motions on the straight pulse but living trough an embodied composition based in reception. the feel when u understand the music with your whole body so well that you can anticipate whats next, so you can even rythmically juxtapose it with what you dance and all that in a life-form with others sharing this experience as value in and of itself. damn i miss dancing. stupid covid
>There has strangely been a long-term dream of computer scientists to replace composition. To "spit out" songs as someone put it. It's usually too scary to ask ourselves "why?" because it usually is a game of validating one's own mind against others' impressions. For some reason, auto-composition seems like some kind of holy grail, but of what?! Saving money buying music? A fantasy of abundance? A kind of "gotcha!" that a pure thought-person has outwitted a silly irl composer? What do you actually get for creating an intelligence that wins a Turing test? You certainly don't get sweaty friends deliriously dancing on drugs at 3 am. You typically just get another social promotion in the direction of aiding greater powers at their control over the world. Is that what it's about? Closing ourselves off from human musical expression in exchange for increased financial standing? Get a job bc you proved you can fool some of them of the time? To validate a work ethic that regards music as frivolous by demonstrating that it can be simulated accurately enough?
To me, music is music, regardless of the creator. If it sounds good, it is good, whether it was composed by a human, a program, or a combination of the two.
If your issue is that this generative music doesn't sound sufficiently good compared to a good human producer/composer, then that's fine. The rest just feels like some kind of weird projection onto my post that I don't understand.
Computer-generated music is not at all considered an interesting goal for financial reasons. I don't even know what you're trying to mean by that. I think it's interesting because:
- It's one of the areas where the best humans still greatly outperform the best programs
- I believe computers do have the potential to one day create excellent, artistic music
I don't align with your view of experiences, passion, cost to an individual, etc. I think Beethoven's music would sound just as good regardless of if he were deaf or not deaf or a mass murderer or anything else. I think art stands on its own, with the backstory just as interesting trivia for those who want to know more about its creator.
Maybe besides https://openai.com/blog/musenet/? The present solution is rather primitive; just a bit of random with time and scale quantisation; but some people seem to be quickly satisfied.
> If you had no music experience, snuck into a club, impersonated a DJ, and just pressed play on this, I think even without touching it, no one would notice anything's amiss. If you messed around with it occasionally, you'd probably get hired back
Some sufficiently intoxicated people will dance to anything, though a good dj feels an obligation to make sure the thing being played is of good quality, regardless.
As to who gets hired, that's more a matter of networking than musical talent.
Sufficiently intoxicated people will dance to anything
I've heard this sentiment before and I always wonder whether it has been given enough thought or whether it's really true for you and the people you know. I mean, me and me friends have left more than one party because we'd rather stroll around the neighbourhood than endure the music the DJ was playing. Admittedly that happened more when not using drugs but it's not like drugs suddenly just make you accept anything. Not even MDMA, which is the one which has plenty of potential in that direction.
> Sufficiently intoxicated people will dance to anything
There's an urban legend saying Richard D James (Aphex Twin) threw a microphone in a kitchen blender at a concert and people were dancing to that sound...
Saying that I have had a similar thing with tracks that have police sirens in them when listening in the car, it takes a moment to realise it isn't an actual emergency vehicle.
Those people need not even be intoxicated, because noise music is its own genre, and some of the people enjoying RDJ will probably be responsive to it; RDJ has had a few moments when he approached the Japanese scene. Indeed, when artists like Merzbow perform at festivals, it is clear that the noise stimulates some people's dance reflexes.
I was at one of those gigs before several years ago. Possibly because the volume was too loud, or the music generally too discordant but about 85% of the crowd went upstairs to the chill out room for the majority of the set. I remember a distinct "nope" feeling. The artist himself was off stage twiddling his knobs too.
Those who remained were selling merch, behind the bar, or stood at the back with arms folded.
Was it because the music was bad though, or because you were opinionated against it?
One may not like certain music, but like with other art it gets into tricky territory to objectively call it bad :) Anyway: yes, it was because we found the music not good. Or not up to par with our expectations. Or not matching our current mood.
I don't have strong opinions against music styles anymore since I went through puberty, the only period in a lifetime where that can be forgiven. Haha, I was one of those idiots who thought metal was the only true music and anything with an electronic beat under it had to die and rot in hell and fans thereof needed to be actively made fun of.
Of course life is so much better if you just listen to literally anything and decide based on what you hear. Which didn't take long to realize. That being said, there are a lot of genres which usually don't do anything at all for me, i.e. which don't make me feel a thing. And others which I almost cannot stand listening to. Most of the time individual songs though. Completely normal, but not the same as being opinionated against it.
Some of the patterns sound really good, but can you change the bpm? I think a DJ set at the same bpm all night would be kind of boring. I love acid techno, but I mix it into other (sub)genres, and have never heard a set where it was only acid techno. That said, it sounds like some of the drum patterns are more electro than techno, which is nice and provides some variety.
I have listened (so no touch or watching it) for a couple of minutes and while the patterns all sounded fine (no an expert in that genre but have been to a number of raves) in isolation many of the changes didn’t feel intentional and at times outright jarring without any transition leading up to it.
I reckon in a club situation you would play the patterns for longer which would make it less notable. I do think it is quite impressive work, but overall it still sounds to too much just like switching between patterns without any bigger “musical arc” (not sure what the correct terminology I’m looking for is) in mind. But to be fair that is what a whole lot of peoples calling themselves producers sound like as well.
That's pretty impressive. Take it to the next level: pattern of patterns. Your level-1 patterns look like a sum of simple repetitions. A level-2 pattern would be a simple repetition of level-1 patterns. And so on.
The button presser could make a claim on the copyright. I could see a legal challenge being filled as this not filling the requirement for being a creative work and hence not copyrightable.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadThis anxiety inducing song by Evol basically switches between samples of different acid tracks every other beat, serves as a nice primer for how you can vary it lol
https://youtu.be/2gWCNpSjUDM
And here’s an example of a cross over into electro-pop-driven house music, Peggy Gou’s remix of Shakedown:
https://youtu.be/tZbf2JR422w
Ishkur’s guide to electronic music has a good rundown of the genre and related stuff:
https://music.ishkur.com/?query=Acid#
(Though I prefer the old school Flash UI over this new one tbh lol)
http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/
303 different tracks in 13:47
Link to full mixtape https://soundcloud.com/ideal-recordings/ideal-mixtape-eleven...
This is a good algorithmic approximation of the quality of 50-80% of sub-professional acid techno live sets. It's a great minimum bar for "should you be performing live": you should at least be more interesting than this webpage of random patterns and sweeps.
To be honest, I'm going to leave this playing a lot. This is an extremely representative sample of a very specific minimal style, one I love a lot.
{Astral Matrix - Elastic}
Add other types of sound (house, trance, etc.) and I will gladly pay a monthly fee to access it
100%
http://di.fm stream many flavours of electronic music, and DJ sets, I've been a paying customer on and off for over a decade.
Also check out http://soma.fm
Will have to check it out, thanks for the heads up.
Are you aware of their other sites, https://www.jazzradio.com/ and https://www.rockradio.com/
Your di.fm subscription gives you member access to those two as well, last time I checked.
> I rarely visit their website as they allow you to save your favourite stations as a play list for your preferred media player.
Agreed 100%, plus the ability to choose the stream quality for your playlist-stations is an added bonus, not even mentioning the hardware player support. It feels rare anymore to have a quality, reasonably-priced, bloat-free service with user-friendly features, but they seriously deliver
And here we are today, the same thing is running in my browser and taking 2% CPU.
Wasted so much time on reason.
They went the subscription route though (if you look hard enough at the website you can still buy the software).
I eventually ended up reading the manual and getting the hang of it. My friend turned me on to it, and he had it mastered. He produced house music and frequently toured the world with Mark Farina back in the day.
Then there was this Dutch House DJ, A-lusion (I think that was his name). He said he used Reason in combination with Cubase.
That got me really really hooked.
Then I found some videos of some hip hop artist, showing how he made hip hop beats in Reason.
That got me so hooked that I still want to go back to that time. But alas, I'm programming. I like programming, but producing music was my passion back in the day.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReBirth_RB-338
Please do not go to any raves during this pandemic.
http://koollondon.com/
Also on Tune In, Alexa etc.
Kidding aside: i agree. Also live manipulation of the patterns by clicking to add/subtract notes/drums would be cool.
All it does is play a sample of a metal door squeaking open, apply a lowpass, and add ambient chatter of the back alley smokers.
It reminds me of a project done some years ago, some people generated millions (billions?) of melodies as a means of trolling copyright claims.
This comment here sums up how bonkers the pandemic is and what effect it's having on people: that was reported in February of last year!
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
Feature request: be able to save a generated track either offline or in the web such that I can go back and listen to it again.
edit: You can't actually hide the window in Safari, as it goes to like 10 BPM. Is it a power saving feature or what?
I love acid music, such a simple formula with infinite variation. There's something so delicious about the wobble of a 303 bassline.
I just want to mention Tin Man for those who are interested in acid. He writes, mostly, quite palatable (often mournful) tunes at house music tempo, but he has a good range and goes full banger at times. A real wizard with a heart for the genre.
https://www.discogs.com/artist/313993-Tin-Man-3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpEDpgCbCPg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COTZGbcS5BQ
Also. Rashad Becker masters most of the Dozzy's and Tin Man works. Very betufiful mastering work: so mellow, so clear and spacious. Take a listen of Donato Dozzy - K album on a good system, you'll hear so many details and beautiful spatial placement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_chime
If you had no music experience, snuck into a club, impersonated a DJ, and just pressed play on this, I think even without touching it, no one would notice anything's amiss. If you messed around with it occasionally, you'd probably get hired back. (And that's a compliment to the app; definitely not a diss of acid techno.)
That very much depends on the club.
Trance/dance music, sure. I guess acid is a subgenre?
They have a lot of DJs from this type of genre.
Check e.g. https://everynoise.com/engenremap.html
It's a cool project and concept, but people in the know would notice.
I'm expecting it to switch an established pattern up (more than it does) on the third repeat, just as I get used to it, and to have fractal-like layers of patterns, which I didn't observe.
Same. You could generate a bunch of random notes using realistic string instrument samples, and be just as far from Bach.
I think what makes it work for people is that it evokes that kind of IDM-ish hipster acid music where hearing something a bit unmusical without a 4-to-the-floor "release" is acceptable. But I'm not sure this system would have as much luck putting together an actual "acid banger" like Lochi's London Acid City, Purple Plejade's Blanche, Hardfloor's Acperience etc.
The problem is that a computer can't know when it really came up with a "banger" of a sequence. When you have a real musician, they can sense when a particular sequence really "clicks" for people, somehow it just accents in places that sound cool. Then they can move ahead with that sequence, tease it and build it and bring it to resolution. This is the holy grail of generated music, I think, to somehow get a computer to a place where it can recognize whatever that quality is.
I doubt it. Perhaps you were lucky with the piece you listened to, but I checked it for 5 minutes and the off-beat things it generates are pretty much unheard of in this genre. Not that there's no off-beat produced by humans, but it doesn't sound anything like this. Simply because what the machine is doing here brakes the rhythm too much, making it harder to dance on, and after all that's what this music is for.
The missing parts would be the choreography and visual design. I also wouldn't personally say it's done unless it is marketing itself. At which point we are in singularity territory.
[0]https://youtu.be/YSyWtESoeOc
[1]https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/
How do you compete against the Misfits, though?
Upon seeing a web page's "impressionistic interpretation/reduction" of a decade or so of music driven primarily by economic and social constraints (warehouse techno), it's so easy for people to pile up thoughts. It's so inexpensive and risk-free for people to say, "oh yeah, that there is good techno/acid," without trying it out on a dancefloor, without having listened to hours and hours of it.
There has strangely been a long-term dream of computer scientists to replace composition. To "spit out" songs as someone put it. It's usually too scary to ask ourselves "why?" because it usually is a game of validating one's own mind against others' impressions. For some reason, auto-composition seems like some kind of holy grail, but of what?! Saving money buying music? A fantasy of abundance? A kind of "gotcha!" that a pure thought-person has outwitted a silly irl composer? What do you actually get for creating an intelligence that wins a Turing test? You certainly don't get sweaty friends deliriously dancing on drugs at 3 am. You typically just get another social promotion in the direction of aiding greater powers at their control over the world. Is that what it's about? Closing ourselves off from human musical expression in exchange for increased financial standing? Get a job bc you proved you can fool some of them of the time? To validate a work ethic that regards music as frivolous by demonstrating that it can be simulated accurately enough?
It's not obvious that every decent musical piece is a more complex and interesting story than its notes. That every new synthesis engine can only ever interpolate its inputs as opposed to incorporate new ideas and more importantly experiences. Experiences that relate to a person and group. We all have a sublime attraction to the story of Beethoven - to having been giving a profound gift and slowly lost part of it. We look for ourselves in his work, where did he break down? How did he handle his unfortunate circumstances?
We perceive music in terms of passion - what it cost an individual in hours of life, blisters, health, money, dedication, etc. We revere Kurt Cobain for pouring out everything he had into his music. If a computer program wrote "You Know You're Right," and we knew there wasn't actually someone real who "never failed to feel....PAAAAAAAAIN," it wouldn't matter to us. Because we're all diffractions of some crazy spiritual force no one understands, but it seems like music is a form of "interdigiation" between us. So why plug our own listening energy into a random number generator and call it good? With respect to ppl saying, "now we can have acid anywhere, anytime," I say, "dial up great mixes on youtube, etc." There are real DJs who put together songs in streams that have even greater meanings than the individual songs - bc, again, music is more than just individuals, it's a collective act.
And no matter what the tech of the day is, it will always be applied as if it were to be the "final," perfect means of autocomposing - remember fractal music in the 90s? PCA synthesis in the early 2000s? So as a fun programming challenge, i say to people, sure, write these programs. But why must we persist in proclaiming their relevance to our active lives when they only resonate in our thoughts.
But it's also the case that one of the things that makes electronic music appealing to a lot of people is that it generally doesn't have the cult of personality that exists in other genres. For sure, some parts of the scene ended up idolizing DJs instead, but I'd say a significant subset of techno fans are specifically not interested in the artistic motivation behind a piece and are instead just looking to hear some cool sounds.
That's why electronic music is a great place to experiment with algorithmic composition, and that's why all these people joking about ravers dancing to washing machines because they're so drugged up kinda missed the point of what we liked about the music in the first place. It's not about telling a story, or communicating an emotion, it's just about creating a cool sound. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that. If a piece of machinery can create a cool sound incidentally, why wouldn't we dance to it?
Of course, as I commented elsewhere, I don't think this particular example is especially notable. The music it generates is not much more interesting than what you'd get if you anyway just hit a "random pattern" button on a 303 clone that lets you constrain the result to a scale. But that doesn't matter, because it's still a nifty project and a bit of fun.
If you really are searching for the true intent of the artist, then you have that with algorithmic composition too. Click round the rest of this developer/artist's site and you'll find lots of little projects and experiments with music and software creations that - even if you don't see them as art, are at the very least the product of a creative hobbyist. There's your passion!
> it's just about creating a cool sound.
I specifically want to create novel hard/dark/minimal techno bangers with similar effort to curating a playlist.
I want a toy that makes music that will keep me and my friends up into the wee hours, without the toil, without the bleeding egoic labor.
And I want people with good taste to have the same ability without putting thousands of hours into learning music theory and arcane details about DAWs and synthesizers and other... Traditional... Tools.
I want to twist the nips of a sexy thump machine and get a good feedback loop[0] going between jerky knees and the stupid-smart NPC musician in my laptop.
I want to spend the night in a tent with eyes that digests my tribe with its acid colors and plays us like so many marionettes until, exhausted, we cut the power and go home. And there wasn't a Guru making it happen, no Chad waiting his turn on the deck, just sound, lightning, and loving this f'n party, man.
The other points about writing songs that express humanity, and the inventor's hubris and all that hit the mark. But deleting the boundary between bedroom production and the rave itself... I'd be hard pressed to imagine anything more fun and exciting.
[0]https://vimeo.com/36579366
I got into making music using DAWs and learned a lot of theory. I focus on making Synthwave/Outrun style music. Not the most technically complex genre sure, but there is a lot of room for creativity as the genre isn't very well defined. I also enjoy how Synthwave isn't really about musical complexity or technicality; instead, it's about the atmosphere. It's nostalgia for a time that never existed in a sense.
Now, all of this to say that I'm still not a great musician. I've been learning banjo for the past year, and getting pretty good at it.
I'll get to the point though: to me, algorithmic music isn't an end, it's a means to an end. The end in this case is composing music. Algorithmic music can be a source of ideas and inspiration in a way that nothing else can. This is especially true if we are able to specify the rule set for music generation. How many times have I sat down at the keyboard and tried to write a melody over some really cool rhythmic bass line I came up with? Countless times. If I could, for example, plug in the a key, rhythmic signature and feeling I'm going for and generate a melody, I would be able to finish more songs. I could use the generated melody as a starting point; it might spark some new ideas. This would be even cooler if I could provide the algorithm with a wav file or some midi and have it try to generate a bass line, melody, chord progression etc.
So, I guess I see algorithmic music generation less as something to replace human made music and more as a tool to aid in sparking creativity in humans composing music.
>I'm still not a great musician
These two statements might be connected. Great musicians redefine or create their own genre. Followers are constrained by the existing definitions.
You play synthwave on a banjo? That sounds pretty creative to me.
Lol no. Those two things are not related, though it does give me some ideas.
To me, music is music, regardless of the creator. If it sounds good, it is good, whether it was composed by a human, a program, or a combination of the two.
If your issue is that this generative music doesn't sound sufficiently good compared to a good human producer/composer, then that's fine. The rest just feels like some kind of weird projection onto my post that I don't understand.
Computer-generated music is not at all considered an interesting goal for financial reasons. I don't even know what you're trying to mean by that. I think it's interesting because:
- It's one of the areas where the best humans still greatly outperform the best programs
- I believe computers do have the potential to one day create excellent, artistic music
I don't align with your view of experiences, passion, cost to an individual, etc. I think Beethoven's music would sound just as good regardless of if he were deaf or not deaf or a mass murderer or anything else. I think art stands on its own, with the backstory just as interesting trivia for those who want to know more about its creator.
https://youtu.be/-VSjctLScAM
Some sufficiently intoxicated people will dance to anything, though a good dj feels an obligation to make sure the thing being played is of good quality, regardless.
As to who gets hired, that's more a matter of networking than musical talent.
I've heard this sentiment before and I always wonder whether it has been given enough thought or whether it's really true for you and the people you know. I mean, me and me friends have left more than one party because we'd rather stroll around the neighbourhood than endure the music the DJ was playing. Admittedly that happened more when not using drugs but it's not like drugs suddenly just make you accept anything. Not even MDMA, which is the one which has plenty of potential in that direction.
There's an urban legend saying Richard D James (Aphex Twin) threw a microphone in a kitchen blender at a concert and people were dancing to that sound...
I've also heard of people dancing to a generator when the hardtek stopped.
To be fair to the people concerned, both examples actually match the style of the music in question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfSndZPynQk
Saying that I have had a similar thing with tracks that have police sirens in them when listening in the car, it takes a moment to realise it isn't an actual emergency vehicle.
Those who remained were selling merch, behind the bar, or stood at the back with arms folded.
Lots of stories from those days.
Was it because the music was bad though, or because you were opinionated against it? E.g. "me and my friends, we don't listen to 2-step garage".
>Admittedly that happened more when not using drugs but it's not like drugs suddenly just make you accept anything.
You'd be surprised...
One may not like certain music, but like with other art it gets into tricky territory to objectively call it bad :) Anyway: yes, it was because we found the music not good. Or not up to par with our expectations. Or not matching our current mood.
I don't have strong opinions against music styles anymore since I went through puberty, the only period in a lifetime where that can be forgiven. Haha, I was one of those idiots who thought metal was the only true music and anything with an electronic beat under it had to die and rot in hell and fans thereof needed to be actively made fun of.
Of course life is so much better if you just listen to literally anything and decide based on what you hear. Which didn't take long to realize. That being said, there are a lot of genres which usually don't do anything at all for me, i.e. which don't make me feel a thing. And others which I almost cannot stand listening to. Most of the time individual songs though. Completely normal, but not the same as being opinionated against it.
THere is a clock dial for bpm... does that solve your issue?
I reckon in a club situation you would play the patterns for longer which would make it less notable. I do think it is quite impressive work, but overall it still sounds to too much just like switching between patterns without any bigger “musical arc” (not sure what the correct terminology I’m looking for is) in mind. But to be fair that is what a whole lot of peoples calling themselves producers sound like as well.
https://youtu.be/sB4RYBpwV0A
But, what are the rights around using this algorithmically generated music? Is it free use? Who owns the copyright