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Java Programming Media Music

Cellular Automata and Music Using Java 115

Posted by simoniker from the musical-geekout dept.
Justin Powell writes "Take computers, mathematics, and the Java Sound API, add in some Java code, and you've got a recipe for creating some uniquely fascinating music. IBM Staff Software Engineer Paul Reiners demonstrates how to implement some basic concepts of algorithmic music composition in the Java language. He presents code examples and resulting MIDI files generated by the Automatous Monk program, which uses the open source jMusic framework to compose music based on mathematical structures called cellular automata."
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Cellular Automata and Music Using Java More

Cellular Automata and Music Using Java

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  • DNA Music (Score:5, Informative)

    by A3thling ( 688205 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:34PM (#9201143) Homepage
    Lets hope it sounds better than DNA music. That was tried a while ago and was horrible.

    • Re:DNA Music (Score:4, Funny)

      by fresh27 ( 736896 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:40PM (#9201170) Homepage
      at the very least, let's hope it's better than jessica simpson/christina/britney music. this is a little less formulaic, so i suppose it's on the right track.

    • Re:DNA Music (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wash23 ( 735420 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:53PM (#9201255)
      DNA music sounded horrible but it was an interesting novelty. With the right kind of encoding scheme you could probably make something that sounded nice. A friend and I once experimented with fractal music (literally) by writing a script to generate the mandelbrot set in a format that was readable by an amiga-based tracker (OCTAMED). The number-of-iterations (color) value was mapped to pitch and instrument. It was neat because it not only sounded pretty interesting (he tweaked the way the numeric value was mapped to instrument and pitch), but you could also watch the mandelbrot pattern scrolling past in ASCII-form when you hit play. Fun diversion for an afternoon anyway.
      • I actually included fractal music in a game I wrote for the commodore 64 way back in 1984. The game was called Attack of the Galactic Gorillas. I know this risks the chance of getting modded up as funny, but it is actually true!

        As an aside, the music sounded horrible back then as well.

    • Re:DNA Music (Score:3, Funny)

      by nateb ( 59324 )
      It probably sounds better than Spam Radio [spamradio.com], at least.
      • Thanks. Now I have to clean out my keyboard, as I sprayed my morning coffee all over I laughed so hard! And the top 10 lists... "never send spam. it is bad" yup...
    • It's a hoax, this is obviously music from a bossfight in one of the castlevania games..

      OK not really, but listen to it!

    • Re:DNA Music (Score:2, Interesting)

      by linzeal ( 197905 )
      At least provide a link to DNA music [dnamusiccentral.com], weird stuff for sure but I actually liked some [amazon.com], Fractal [ntlworld.com], stuff [google.com].

    • Re:DNA Music (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Billly Gates ( 198444 )
      " Lets hope it sounds better than DNA music. That was tried a while ago and was horrible."

      no shit [mp3.com].

    • Meta Math Music (Score:2, Informative)

      by quantumpunk ( 773486 )
      Some other interesting music made with math can be found at metamath.org where they made midi tracks based on mathematical proofs. Some of them sound pretty cool. Here is the link: Metamath.org/mpegif/mmmusic [metamath.org]

      From the site:

      Mathematical Proofs Set to Music I added this web page just for fun. While looking at some proofs, it occurred to me that their structure resembled musical scores, so as an experiment I decided to see what they sounded like. Essentially, the musical notes correspond to the depth o

    • where the "hero" created a software to render companies earning report into music, and had it as their best selling soft and main revenue source - just after the software to create spending justifiction that was licensed to various governemental agencies ....

      damn memory ! anyone can contribute their 2 cents and help me upgrade ?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) * on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:35PM (#9201146)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • ..to code in Java: There are very nice libraries that take care of the plumbing for you and help you write clean code faster. In this case, the library in question is jMusic.

      I'm sure Chuck is awesome (it sure looks cool yet daunting), but as a java coder by day and a musician by night, I'm rather intrigued by jMusic myself.
    • Well they "try" to make you "catch" a tune!

    • Java vs. specialty languages (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jtheory ( 626492 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @12:49AM (#9201824) Homepage Journal
      It's not the capabilities of jMusic or the Java Sound API that led them to Java. If you just balance a list of capabilities in the musical realm, there are plenty of specialty languages and environments -- i.e., MAX, PD, ChucK, and so on -- that have greater built-in capabilities, because they are languages or scripting engines focussed only on music. That's also the downside of those languages, though; they are specialty languages.

      In '97-'98 I wrote a bunch of music theory training programs for the Music department at my school (they eventually became this website [emusictheory.com]), and I tried out MAX first before I went with Java. MAX was far better equipped to handle the music-related requirements (anyone remember Java 1.0.2?). But with Java I could put my applets online, run them on any OS, and (biggest bonus) get some serious experience in a language that would get me my first job when I got out of college. Learning a new language to a level where you can tackle an ambitious project is a big investment. There are a lot of musicians and composers with day jobs as developers (like me) who want to be able to leverage what they already have, if feasible. And nowadays, Java has pretty good support for audio, as general-purpose languages go, so many projects wouldn't be giving up much to use Java.

      Here are a few snippets from the jMusic website [qut.edu.au] that suggest why they chose Java for their project:
      Programming in jMusic is programming in Java, not in a meta-language or scripting environment. This means that the full power and cross platform independence of Java is maintained, it also means that the more you know about Java programming the more useful jMusic will be to you. Learning jMusic can be a fun way to gain Java programming skills while focusing on making music.


      [...]Because jMusic has full access to the Java language and support structures, your jMusic work can be as extensive as Java allows (and that is VERY extensive).
      There are more hints at this in the intro of the article, as well.
    • Java provides a wide range of APIs to work with for math, networking and graphics. Cross platform support. The JSyn Plugin [softsynth.com] provides a great synthesis package for making sound, and it can be used with various web browsers. (Linux support is in its early stages.) Here are a range JSyn examples [softsynth.com] including more algorithmically generated music in Java.

  • No Control (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mphase ( 644838 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:35PM (#9201147) Homepage
    It's nice and all but I don't see how there is any real control of the product. Like most other computer generated music it is must fiddled with until something pleasing accidently resulted, right? I probably just missed something.

  • sounds like an arstechnica performance... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mrgreenfur ( 685860 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:36PM (#9201151)
    a teacher/performer/artist/programmer at my school did a performance at arstechnica called 'cell phone symphony' where he used the audiences cell phones to make music! Each person sat in one chair, mapped to a grid on his computer. They got special phone connections with the phone company to dial a lot at once. They got a big projector to projet over the audience, and had a spotlight (of sorts, from the projector) pop up on someone when their phone rang. The whole audience watched via a big mirror.

    heres the wired article. [flong.com]

  • Forget music! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <namtabmiaka>> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:36PM (#9201153) Homepage Journal
    I've got old skool sound effects right here [dnsalias.com]. The whole game fit in 4K, even won the 4K Java Game programming contest.

    It requires that you have Java installed in order to play. It doesn't work on Linux, tho. Sorry. Complain at Sun to get full screen mode working on Linux.

  • In related news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by k4_pacific ( 736911 ) <k4_pacific@yahoo . c om> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:36PM (#9201154) Homepage Journal
    The RIAA announced today that they will be using this technology to phase out recording artists altogether. CDs will still cost $16.99, though.

  • ugh (Score:3, Funny)

    by parcel ( 145162 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:38PM (#9201163)
    so, computer generated music sounds like... well... computer generated music.

    or maybe like a four year old banging on a keyboard.

    although, does that mean the program has intelligence equivalent with a four year old human? ;)

    • Re:ugh (Score:3, Funny)

      by Vireo ( 190514 )
      As the author of the article says:
      As with much good music, you need to listen to it a few times before you can appreciate it fully.

      • Oog. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by DoraLives ( 622001 )
        As with much bad music, you can listen to it all you want and it still sounds awful.

        I suppose it's all in the ear of the beholder or something. Ah well.

  • Orwell was right! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by k4_pacific ( 736911 ) <k4_pacific@yahoo . c om> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:40PM (#9201173) Homepage Journal
    Could it be?

    "Here were produced ... sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator." --Orwell's '1984'

  • Fractal music (Score:5, Informative)

    by VAXGeek ( 3443 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:41PM (#9201182) Homepage
    If you like that, try this: Fractmus 2000 (win32) [hitsquad.com]

    • Re:Fractal music (Java Applet) (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I while ago I did my own experimenting with Java generated fractal audio. I took a different approach - using the fractal data to produce raw samples rather than MIDI notes.
      I wrote it up at this page: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~andrew-1/fractal / [paradise.net.nz]

      (you will need a recent JVM from SUN to use the applet)

    • Re:Fractal music (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Evil Grinn ( 223934 )
      Fractal, schmactal. Hacked-2-Basics [sourceforge.net] lets you "play" a VT100 like a musical intrument, with sounds derived from things like the Linux kernel and DOOM.WAD interpreted as 8-bit mono PCM samples. Uses pure write(2) to /dev/dsp. Written to run on computers so low-end that a musician can set fire to them onstage.

      Yes, I'm blabbering about my own musical project but so is everyone else on this story.

  • Visual Music (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rexguo ( 555504 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:41PM (#9201183) Homepage

    Interesting, though I used Java to visualize [waterlogic.com.sg] symmetrical structures in the music of J.S.Bach. I used stereoscopic 3D (with OpenGL) and 4-channel 3D sound (with DirectSound3D) to 'virtually' present the 4-parts: Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass, flying around in 3D, not just visually, but aurally too. It was exhibited 2 years ago.

    • Re:Visual Music (Score:5, Informative)

      by rexguo ( 555504 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:47PM (#9201219) Homepage

      Also, the short write-up we handed out during the exhibition can be found here [waterlogic.com.sg].

      • I've messed around with generating music by a method based on l-systems (which is really just a language for describing recursive patterns). You can get nice semi-random results because it takes large sequences which themselves 'make sense' to the ear (that is, some human composed the sequence) and then strings them together in ways that eventually repeat, but offset a few notes, giving a sense of theme (that pattern you heard at the beginning shows up at the end again). I wonder what those generated songs
    • See Musitives [eunet.fi] , which uses Java to generate music from pictures.

  • Awesome... (Score:3, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:44PM (#9201198) Homepage Journal

    I can't wait to hear these new Java-written MIDIs on Geocities pages, complete with leet spinning skulls and black background...

  • midi file indicates CA skil 1 year piano student (Score:3, Funny)

    by auburnate ( 755235 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:44PM (#9201203)
    All one has to do is click the midi link to realize that the tinkering of a first year piano student could easily be mistaken for a celluar automata.

  • KeyKit (Score:5, Informative)

    by jbum ( 121617 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:46PM (#9201211)
    My personal preference for coding this kind of thing:

    KeyKit, an awk-like language designed specifically for manipulating MIDI data.

    http://nosuch.com/keykit/
  • Did I miss something...

    Mathematically based pattern gerenation mechanism applied to midi format produces repeating rhythmic sounds.
    (don't forget the subjective addition: "that sound bloody terrible!!")

    My god, this is so amazing...

    Maybe if we hand tweak the pattern generation mechanism enough...we could get it sounding like... REAL MUSIC!!

    Sorry, call me when you can approximate dance music, the most basic of rhythmic beats.

    I apologise for the cynicism, third (or so) computer gen'ed music ar
    • While it may not sound like the kind of music people make that doens't have to be the point. Some of these are pretty interesting to listen to. Try listening to rule110.midi. That being said rule110 reminds me of some of philip glass's work.
      • Agreed. I have a pretty good grasp on 20th-Cen composition, and the frightning thing is that some of those pieces are better than some avante garde stuff I've listened to.

        Granted, that probably says more about the composers (*cough*cage*cough*) than cellular automata.

      • I think you missed the point.

        Of course any pattern based data processed to make a music file will sound like man-made music. Due to the hairy, university-trained composers out there, the only thing that defines most music is some sort of pattern!! (if even that)

        So exactly what else does this show us, or is that it?? That was what I was trying to say.

        I can take any number of pattern/fractal/etc data and produce stuff similar to this. What is your point exactly??
      • Listened to 110 again and still I hold true to my statements.

        It is simply an audio "visualisation" of pattern data. (pattern data taken to include things like fractals the repeat in interesting ways)

        I don't want it to sound like man music, just some sort of sound that actually approximates something like music. Certain musicians specialise in creating random sounding music for various academic (one only hopes) purposes, but this is not what this is.

  • Dot matrix music (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wash23 ( 735420 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @09:59PM (#9201280)
    Okay, this risks being called a bit off topic, but it's so cool (and reasonably relevant) that it has to be mentioned. Dot matrix printer music [emusic.com] by this group The User [sat.qc.ca] has been around for awhile. It's not algorithmic music, but by printing strings of characters simultaneously to different dot matrix printers they make some pretty interesting sounding stuff.

  • Music using weighted random Markov strings... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:04PM (#9201307)
    ...might be interesting. Play a note at random, choose a note based on the weighted probability of the next note in a corpus of music, then use the first two notes to figure out the weighted probability of the third, and so on.

    Then if you go out four notes and only one note has any probability of being the fifth in that series, drop off notes from the beginning of the string until there is more than one possibility and continue. Something like:
    1
    12
    123
    1234
    (note 5 always follows notes 1234, so drop the 1)
    (1)2346
    (1)23467
    (note 8 always follows 23467, so drop 2, note 8 still follows 3467 so drop 3, then there is more than one possible note)
    ((1)23)4679 {etc}

    Then the music would probably sound really familiar, but just about the time you catch on it segues into another pseudo-familiar tune.
    • No, its like this:

      You go out two notes and calculate the weight based on the cosine of the third note. Divide that by the last note of a harmonic frequency. If the note in question is sharp or flat, divide by six and take the remainder. Omit every third note. After the sixth note, if the notes are in fact, collinear and not symmetric, you can reverse the cofactor matrix and restore the eigenvalues, but not without first calculating the modulus of the largest cubic divisor.

      • Wow. I have no idea what you just said, but it reminded me of the Hit Song Science [hitsongscience.com]program which is the music industry software that predicts whether a tune is going to be a "hit" or a "miss"

        Appropriately enough for this thread, this article [ananova.com] has a quote from Polyphonic HMI's chief executive Mike McCready "There are a limited number of mathematical formulas for hit songs. We don't know why."

        Once they open-source those mathematical formulas that they've derived, then we can start using all the music devel
    • It will still sound random because you are only generating "familiarity" locally. To make an enjoyable piece you probably have to have another more high level structure.
    • An alternative to Markov strings would be using a Pink (aka 1/f or Zipfian) distribution. There have been hundreds of studies that show nature follows such a distribution. I've read some that show bird calls follow the same distribution. If the assumption that nature is pleasing is correct, then pleasing music would have the same distribution. So, you can create your string the same way, say you have 122132 and you want the next one. A 2 will make it more balanced in the Pink sort of way. You can keep
    • It was done at least 16 years ago.

      I quote from an essay [dnbscene.com] I wrote at uni a couple of years ago (apologies for the closed format, heh):

      Indeed, Holmes, discussing why computers have been so widely used for music, asserts that "the answer lies in the nature of music that has developed during the twentieth century... certain schools of composition [have] stressed a greater emphasis on the mathematics of music." One example is Stochasticism, whereby parts of the piece remain under the direct control of the comp

  • douglas adams (Score:5, Interesting)

    by golgafrincham ( 774723 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:12PM (#9201330) Journal
    damn, this man was insightful. he wrote about an internet-like structure describing the network of the h2g2 book, but he did also describe (at a very detailed level) how to create and use this kind of sound "tools" in his "dirk gently" novels.

    i mean, just read what he wrote about computer interfaces in h2g2 (when ford is breaking into the hq). adams was damn smart and way more funny than clarke.

    but did you know that adams did not invent this style of writing sf? read "the star diaries" by stanislaw lem. funny. uh... just read anything written by lem. you think clark or heinlein novels are great? just as an example, do you wanna know where the matrix authors stole the idea of these human-driven fighting robots? "The Invincible".
    • do you wanna know where the matrix authors stole the idea of these human-driven fighting robots?

      Battletech! And you don't call them robots for they are 'mechs.

      However, I agree with your points about Lem, whose writing is IMHO much more fun and much more SF than that of many 'famous' SF authors, including Adams.

  • Who owns the copyright? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by El Mulo ( 659584 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:15PM (#9201340)
    Who owns the copyright of the computer generated music? The programer? The user? The machine?
    • the RIAA...consider yourself busted....

    • Re:Who owns the copyright? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      IANAL, but here's how I understand it:

      The person who generated the music has the copyright (not the programmer or the program).

      Unless a substantial part of the copyrighted program is included in the output. For an extreme example, imagine a simple program that "generates" music by playing one of two MP3s, and the MP3s were copyrighted by the programmer. The output includes a substantial part of the original program, so in fact the output is copyrighted by the original programmer.

      On the other end, imagine
    • If it was produced on a UNIX-like operating system (probably including Windows 2000/XP) then all rights surely accrue to SCO as it is clearly a derivative work.

      Furthermore, by posting links to a site containing SCO's IP (thereby encouraging people to play the midi files) slashdot is taking a serious risk of being SCO's next legal target.

  • from the my-favourite-artist-is-3.14159265.. dept. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Samah ( 729132 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:33PM (#9201396)
    After following some links, here's some cool human-assisted mathematically-generated music:
    http://www.geocities.com/vienna/9349/ [geocities.com]

    The first prime number and pi midi files are awesome ;)

    Might hafta wait til tomorrow tho - looks like the guy's geocities account got /.'d already =)

  • Computer Music (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sanat ( 702 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:47PM (#9201448)
    This reminds me of the CDC computer that played classical music utilizing the speaker in the console via program loops, also

    The card reader reading cards at the appropriate time

    The tape drives rocking tapes and loading/unloading the heads

    The disk drives clicking head carriage locking solenoids

    The card punch punching a few cards in rhythm

    The line printer printing the cadence

    Listening to Mozart, Bach etc. was quite an experience in this manner. Unfortunately we did not have the source code.

    Of course, back in those days we did however sit closer to the machine code than one typically does presently. So it was possible to list it and see how it did what it did.

    The cpu timing cycles (core read & write) was accomplished with a delay line and sending a "0" pulse down the coil with various taps located at the appropriate distance to perform each timing step in order.

  • jMusic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thanjee ( 263266 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:54PM (#9201468) Journal
    Wow - my best friend is one of the developers of jMusic! It is an open source music synthesis and composition package written in java. You can download the latest version from sourceforge.
    or you can get it from the jMusic web site:

    http://jmusic.ci.qut.edu.au

    jMusic has been used for many other very weird and wonderful things like elevator installations, and many electronic performances. It does heaps of stuff including Markov, gendyn, granular and particle synthesis, dance music and much more :)

  • Interesting and all (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nate nice ( 672391 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @10:55PM (#9201472) Journal
    This is cool, but I'm guessing the results won't be very...well, great. Theoretically you could construct every bit pattern for say, 1 MB - 5 MB, capturing the typical encoding of an MP3. Then, you select each byte pattern that sounds good. You would in fact "create" every song that has ever been encoded into MP3 format between 1 and 5 MB. The only problem with this is you are creating more byte patterns than there are protons in the universe, so this is of course practically impossible. It doesn't stop with music either. Anything that can be encoded digitally can be "created" this way. Obviously this cannot happen, not with what we know of anyways, so it's pointless. But it is interesting none the less to think that everything you see, hear, use etc in the realm of digitazion can be created with a simple NFA or graph set to take each "path" and then decode what's viable, etc. Perhaps I should create this algorithm and claim all information withen a certain byte range, sueing for copyright infringment anytime something is created on a computer, as my algorithm has created it already. It's interesting to think about how we get to "create" a finite path in a DFA or byte graph that really already exists, but we need to "find" it.
    • Thank you for stating the obvious.

      The point of this work isn't to create random sounds, but to create music that sounds tolerable to humans. It's significantly different from just generating every possible sequence of bytes that make up a valid MP3 file or valid MIDI file.

      • Thank you for stating the obvious

        Sure, it is obvious to anyone with some, or possibly no, computer science background but the post was mainly for those who don't understand this concept. I also find it rather interesting that anything you do on a computer is simply the construction of a finite bit pattern. It's simply beautiful. How human thought uses al these abstratcions to find these paths is amazing, etc.

        The point of this work isn't to create random sounds, but to create music that sounds toler

  • I can imagine Darl McBride runs it day and night to make and release a "music compilation CD" that consists of 100,000,000 different music patterns and develops a patern comparison program to sue some upcoming musician.

    Seriously, heard it [ibm.com], and it sounds better than monkey punching keyboard as it has some rhythm and cycle, but still, calling it "music" is wild use of the word. What's the point of "Using Java"?
  • The terrain-mapped music in that game didn't sound totally awful.
  • Autonomous Monk sounds like a forced play on words on the name of jazz great Thelonius Monk, though I doubt that he would have thought much of the resulting music.
    • Clearly it is. On that note, I just finished my first year at the University of Idaho [uidaho.edu] (incidentally, it has the only music college named after a jazz musician--Lionel Hampton, who moved to the town it's in, Moscow, Idaho and helped with the university a lot)... me and some music major friends put together a jazz trio called Theophilus Monk, since I lived in the Donald R. Theophilus Residence Hall Tower. So, marginally more clever. :)

  • Staff software engineer? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Number44 ( 41761 ) on Wednesday May 19, 2004 @11:53PM (#9201671) Homepage
    I'm puzzled why the poster referred to the title of the guy as "Staff Software Engineer" as if it's something special at IBM. Not to denigrate the work he's done, but 'staff engineer' is not worth mentioning. In context as seen from an IBM Engineers perspective (I'm also staff, fwiw) it's pretty funny that you would even include it. Here's the ranks for those that might care:

    Band 1-5: The non-technical types.

    Band 6: "nothing" Engineer (new hires)

    Band 7: Staff Engineer (basically, you get staff in your first few years at IBM unless you're a total moron, and if you DON'T make staff at some point they basically have to promote or fire you)

    Band 8: Advisory Engineer (most IBM engineers spend the bulk of their career as advisory)

    Band 9: Senior Engineer (the fastest I've seen senior made was 10 years, and it's typically 15+ before you get to senior)

    Band 10: Senior Technical Staff Member or STSM (most engineers at IBM never make it this far)

    Band 11: Distinguished Engineer (you have to walk on water and have saved entire villages from destruction to get to this, you basically do whatever you want with a huge budget and work on only the coolest stuff)

    Band 12: IBM Fellow (you are the uber shiznit, report to the execs, and the world is your oyster)

    Look at this as an insight into the workings of the hive mind at IBM. We are the borg, yada yada yada.
  • I'd suggest that interested folks check-out http://www.sseyo.com [sseyo.com] to see a completely different approach to creating generative music, using SSEYO's Koan music engine, which is actually aimed at deploying mobile devices. The site lets Windows users download a plugin/Active X that allows you to listen to some of the interactive sounds/music, and play with the demos, including the awesome "Do The Space Shake" :)

  • Grammidity (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LarsWestergren ( 9033 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @04:26AM (#9202315) Homepage Journal
    Another program (written in Java incidentally) which among other things generate music: Grammidity [sourceforge.net]

    It works on the "evolve" principle where you "mate" two objects, and then let either the user or some algorithm decide which of the children are most successful and can evolve further.
  • Then we can expect all the compositions to be adagios? ;)
  • The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
    (Muriel Rukeyser)

    A song ain't nothin in the world but a story
    just wrote with music to it. (Hank Williams Sr)

    music is composed of notes and sounds, yet they are
    the substance of expression, and not the music itself.

    stories -- you love someone, they leave, you feel loss, pain, grief.
    something happens, you're happy, joy, love - your father may
    aggravate you, you have an argument, you try and listen,
    you resolve it; you find a friend, you get along, because

  • AI music from the Amiga (Score:2, Interesting)

    by maokh ( 781515 )
    Back in the day, there was a weird program for the Amiga computer called "Algoplayer". This program used some crazy AI code to generate random MOD-like songs, based on a seed number. Of course, the genre is techno/house!

    A few years back, I brushed the dust off of my old Amiga, powered it on, and recorded a few good songs produced from this generator.

    I have posted several MP3's of sample output on this website, and some of it rivals some of the garbage coming out of the Dance Top 40 as of late.

    http:/ [maokhian.com]

  • This isn't new (Score:2, Informative)

    by Walter Wart ( 181556 )
    Algorithmic music systems go back at least as far as Mozart. Composers made up algorithms to generate tunes with some sort of randomization (e.g. dice) to make key decisions.
  • Meant to post this earlier--there is a site featuring some pretty cool "algorithmic jazz" pieces by John Clavin here

    http://www.algorithmicjazz.com/

    The compositions (computer programs) are written in Java and use the Jsyn software engine. (Plug in available on the website)

    Best quote:
    "The soul of the machine is the collection of algorithms that give it life."

    There are three pieces of varying complexity--mood music for sensitive robots, methinks.

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