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Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

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Re: Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

#111

There's a nice website with a clean UI called 'Music for programming', put together by a guy who curates playlists designed to compliment anyone who wants to buckle down and do deep focus creative work for a while. I've been through each of his 53 playlists several times. 'Asiatsana' is one track in one playlist, but the music overall is very much in keeping with the mood and tone of Asiatsana. https://musicforprogra…

Link got messed up: https://musicforprogramming.net/?fortyfive

k, I fixed it, thanks.

Re: Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

#112
post #30
post #26

Huh. Was bracing for something like "come to daddy" when I hit play. Didn't realize Aphex Twin did anything else.

He's basically the father of modern claustrophobic ambient with his Selected Ambient Works pt2. A very special thing to fall asleep and wake up while it's still playing. Diverged from Brian Eno's more warm and happy tunes to something darker.

Agreed on the ambient classification but I always think of him as much more than that as far as influence goes. He's basically had an influence on a huge portion of electronic and non-electronic music over the past few decades.

Re: Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

#113
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the ports have been fantastic. The PS4 version supports PSVR, and the experience of Rez in VR is quite magical tbh. Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the producer of Rez, also worked on Tetris Effect which has an amazing soundtrack. Tetris Effect feels like a weird cousin of Rez btw!

>> The PS4 version supports PSVR Oh, fuck off. That's amazing. Colour me almost wanting to grab one. Wish it had a Vive port. I'm not a fan of Tetris. I like games that have a very distinct 'beginning and end of the level' feeling.

Check out Rez Infinite on Steam. Seems to support Oculus and Vive. (https://store.steampowered.com/app/636450/Rez_Infinite/)

Re: Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

#114

What is a good way to go about working with a new JS library? I only have used Python, Java, and C#. All the tutorials I find on tone.js just include the js code but not information on how to link the library. I would like to play around but getting the dev environment has stumped me.

there are many code playground sites[0] that could make the process less painful for you. essentially you will need to reference the library. you can do it locally, or reference the publicly available version (most libraries have a CDN hosted version). you could also google for the playground site + library, because there may already be a playground setup (a project with a reference to the library already set) for th…

How do I tell what language to use with this package?

From what I can tell it uses react. I have tried node, angular, and react but this installation page confounds me [0]. as far as I understand, I have been using either npm init, ng init, or create-react-app to initialize the directory for an example project. Then I do npm install tone inside of the directory I created.

I have found this [1] playground for tone but it does not elucidate how the library should be or is referenced.

I'd like to work with generative music but the amount I must know and choose between in a js project always seems to freeze me at the project init phase.

In the process of editing this comment I have finally gotten tone.js to work. Here are the steps i followed: npm install create-react-app create-react-app tone-test cd tone-test npm install tone add "import Tone from '../node_modules/tone'" to the top of App.js this step is what I was messing up previously i believe then I just throw tone commands at the bottom of App.js and they play on pageload, this is exactly what I wanted for now.

[0] https://github.com/Tonejs/Tone.js/wiki/Installation [1] https://codepen.io/loderunnr/pen/AXoAko

Re: Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

#115
post #93

Has this guy never heard of a bar or measure? Reading through the first section where he describes the song as sections of 16 beats makes me cringe, and this is coming from someone admittedly horrible with music theory. Edit: I was turned off by his constant usage of the word “beats”, not phrase.

Thanks for the feedback. I figured people who understood music would feel this way, but I deliberately chose to omit as many musical words as possible so that readers who weren't familiar with them wouldn't get lost. I would have felt obligated to define "bar" and "measure" if I used them, and ultimately I decided they weren't necessary. Sure, I could have defined what a measure was, that there are four beats in a measure (in this particular case), that each phrase is four measures instead of 16 beats, and what time signatures and quarter notes and eighth notes are. However, I believe all of this would have bloated the article and alienated readers who aren't as familiar with music theory as you and I are. As is, the article is still perfectly readable to someone who does have an understanding of music theory, and all we have to put up with is some non-traditional terms like "half-beat."

Re: Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

#116
There are a number of languages / environments to help with the creation of generative music under the umbrella term 'live coding' - the community also tries to keep the performance aspects of music intact.

Lots of great starting points at: https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding

Re: Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

#117
post #13

Seems to go more to the direction what Autechre is doing nowadays. I'd recommend to have a listen to the NTS Sessions if you feel adventurous...

I'm glad you mentioned them. Autechre produced my favourite hacking background music. I agree, people interested in the generative music should definitely give NTS Sessions a listen. But for the newcomers I'd suggest to start with their early IDM albums(Incunabula, Amber) as NTS Sessions may sound too "glitchy".

I think nobody else goes where they are going right now. Very forward looking and absolutely amazing listening when you "get it". Elseq, NTS Sessions and now these 40+ hours of live archives released. There is an algorithm that just does things to sound. Sometimes it's just noise that turns into the most beautiful thing in the world.

Re: Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

#118
post #41

I'd love to see what Richard has to say about this.

> Aphex Twin (aka Richard James) is known for creating original, complex sounds whenever he can, but his next creation might just take the cake. He tells Groove that he hired a programmer to develop music software based on mutation. Once you give the app an audio sample, it automatically generates six variants on that and asks you to pick your favorite before going on to create more variations -- think of it as natural selection for sweet beats. The software still "needs to be tweeked," and there's no mention of a public launch, but the early output reportedly sounds "totally awesome." Don't be shocked if one of James' post-Syro albums uses this software to create some truly one-of-a-kind tunes.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2014/12/29/aphex-twin-mutation-musi...

Re: Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

#119
post #4

For musicians and devs, it's a good hint that Markov chains are "good enough" for most interesting music applications, ML/AI doesn't typically yield better results. Happy to see this on the front page!

I feel like the Markov chain could also apply go higher level song formula, with probability weights for choruses, verses, bridges, breakdowns, solos, etc. I prefer to just write a bunch of riffs and see where they grow organically, but it seems the chain would be a great tool to piece some of those ideas together or give an indicator of where they could go when a creative block is hit.

I think it should be more interesting to create a formular that sounds nice. In effect, that's what's done when creating structures "organically". Hence a lot of music is formulaic, but the problem with that is that the formular is predictable on purpose. It's not strictly simple, not everyone can do it freely, but the more complexity, the harder it is to stay within any given constraint. Vice versa, adding a lot of complexity just to satisfy a weird constrained, instead of relaxing the constraint can seem overloaded. The latter notion may be a meta constrained, so you get a dynamical system. The dynamics of a Markoc Chain are either limited or hard to control as far as I can tell, as its a random process. But the expressiveness is king. The way I imagine controling that would involve human interpretation in a trial and error loop, and therefore a lot of bad music. This, and the imitation of prior art is a given for unplugged music, too, of course, but the material to draw from is so diverse that a markov chain is more likely to pick up all the bad parts, too.

I mean, most music is terribly dull and meaningless in the grand picture of things. The selection of input would be more like the job of a DJ. I don't know how much creativity can be fit into programming the chain, what features to pickup. It would probably just be a part of a bigger workflow, starting small, creating short samples, arranging those, and cetera.

For the story it helps that Aphex Twin is rather random to begin with (e.g. having created a song by reverse fourier syntheses over a gray scale picture, creating the sound to a desired spectrogramm). The irony is appreciable, though comendable if someone likes the result.

Re: Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

#120
post #68
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably my favorite album for programming and other work that require concentration. I still haven't encountered anything like it. I wish there was more.

Gerald Donald's work (alias Dopplereffekt, Arpanet, Japanese Telecom, was part of Drexciya) works well for me for programming for years. Especially the Album "Inertial Frame" from Arpanet. Calabi Yau Space from Dopplereffekt as well (which was released on Aphex Twin's own label Rephlex)

Thanks for reminding me about inertial frame
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