The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music • Hacker News Board

Re: The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

#211

Post by munificent » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

Supernaut wrote: post #81

sideshowb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who writes mainly loop based genres I agree and have thought about much the same stack of abstractions. Acid techno is a great starting point as it's not known for complexity, being traditionally produced with a 909+303+303, devices that support only a 1 bar loop (a genre with origins that predate wide availability of digital audio workstations). But like yourself I'm interested in more complex genres. One…

> 909+303+303, devices that support only a 1 bar loop Ha, no, you can input a great deal more than a single bar into them. They were designed to let users store a variety of patterns, which can then be assembled into a traditional intro-verse-chorus song structure, if you so wish.

Even with a single pattern, you can add a lot of variation just by changing the pattern lengths to do polyrhythms. Say you do:

    909: 16 steps
    303 bass: 5 steps
    303 lead: 3 steps

Now you have a sequence that only repeats every 240 steps or every 15 bars, even though each device never uses more than a single 16 step pattern.

Re: The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

#212

Post by joshka » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

rjh29 wrote: post #69

Couple observations: 1. The whole thing is done in 1000 lines of code after unobfuscation (including 808 and 303 emulation, sequencer, random generation, UI) - technically it's quite impressive. 2. Part of why it makes such good patterns seems to be reliance on octaves. The patterns usually contain at least 50% or more of the same note repeated, across one or more octaves, and coinciding with rhythmic beats. Even whe…

https://github.com/vitling/acid-banger/blob/main/src/pattern...

Re: The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

#213

Post by abetusk » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

joshka wrote: post #210

abetusk wrote: post #85

Vitling just published the source (CC-BY) [0] [1]. [0] https://github.com/vitling/acid-banger [1] https://twitter.com/vvitling/status/1384434602442428416

The pattern generation logic[1] is surprisingly simple. [1]: https://github.com/vitling/acid-banger/blob/main/src/pattern...

Yeah, very nice. This gets something right that so many other generative music experiments get wrong, which is variation in note length (aka tempo). You see other generative music use Markov Chain for note choice but not note length and it quickly becomes very "same-y", whereas this has, for the vast majority of melodies it generates, a natural feel (to me).

I wish I understood the WebAudio API better to get a better handle on how the instruments are created.

Re: The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

#214

Post by tlhunter » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

As a fan of Acid music this is actually pretty good. It even has "drop" measures where the drums disappear and the lead goes through a dynamic cutoff filter. Every now and then a bad lead/bass combination does pop up.

Re: The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

#215

Post by samcodes » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

well this really takes me back to fiddling with FruityLoops in all my spare time in my teens. very fun, and I love the code

Re: The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

#216

Post by wpietri » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

jmfldn wrote: post #197

wpietri wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get why people want machine-aided composition. But I'd love to see a project like this go in the opposite direction. Maybe put a row of buttons at the top: "I am [Loving it] [Grooving] [Fine] [A Bit Bored] [About to Quit]". Then use that (plus browser data and window-close data) to train ML models to maximize engagement. Or perhaps to hook it up to facial expression recognition. When I watch friends DJ, there's thi…

That would be a fun project for sure! So many of the selections that great DJs make are curveballs and surprising choices. This is less true in more samey genres, but true pioneering selectors will tend to surprise you with their taste and juxtapositions in a way that's hard or maybe even impossible to really capture in an algorithm. Put another way, even in something as simple a song selection, the weirdness and con…

For sure! I'll always appreciate the deeper stuff that only humans can do. I just think it would be interesting to see how much of it we could automate. E.g., could it get to the level of decent background music?

Of course, there's always the possibility algorithmic composers could do even better than humans. Clarke told a story about that in 1957: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Melody

Text here: https://archive.org/details/1957-02_IF/page/n71/mode/2up?vie...

Re: The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

#217

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

jmfldn wrote: post #58

This is a great project, well done. Algorithmic music is fascinating to me, I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in the concept particularly with more 'complex' genres where higher levels of composition and structural continuity are required. This tends to work much better with loop-based genres but I'd personally love to do a side project on something that could write melodies from some sort of generative…

Excellent project, also serves to provide some quick audio latency test for devices. Quality of playback seems to vary between browsers and devices (DDG/FF -Android); I presume it's consistent and better in iOS devices as it's known for better audio latency(Don't have one nearby to test).

If the author is reading this, Would love to hear about the quirks related to audio playback in browsers/devices you've found so far in developing this.

Re: The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

#218

Post by crucialfelix » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

stinos wrote: post #49

meowface wrote: post #45

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.)

no one would notice anything's amiss 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 al…

Original acid had lots of glitch beats and computer madness

https://youtu.be/-VSjctLScAM

Re: The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

#219

Post by s1mon » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

This is definitely enjoyable and impressive for being done in a browser. It covers some of the core bits of a prototypical acid set up, but there are some basic things missing.

The "909" section only has 4 sounds with some (4?) different velocity (think loudness) levels. The real thing had 26 knobs to adjust the 10 different individual outputs (plus L/R) of 11ish sounds (ride and crash cymbals are on separate outs, but open/closed high hats are on one out). The "303" has 4 knobs but the real thing has 6 and the delay would be from some sort of external effects, so really it's missing 3 controls (tuning, env mod, and accent).

The note color seems to indicate accents and slides (the yellow and purple), but I'm still having trouble hearing which is which and it's not really doing a great job of getting to the level of resonance and distortion that happens with the real thing. It's nice that delay has been added as an effect on both "303"s and the overall mix, but there are so many classic acid tracks which relied on some sort of distortion either through external effects or various mods.

The whole issue of 303 emulators is a huge rabbit hole in and of itself. [1] The history of the 303 and its various uses can also go on for hours [2]

[1] https://djmag.com/longreads/8-best-tb-303-clones-according-a...

[2] http://blog.dubspot.com/roland-tb-303-spotlight/

Re: The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music

#220

Post by Applejinx » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #157

jmfldn wrote: post #58

This is a great project, well done. Algorithmic music is fascinating to me, I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential in the concept particularly with more 'complex' genres where higher levels of composition and structural continuity are required. This tends to work much better with loop-based genres but I'd personally love to do a side project on something that could write melodies from some sort of generative…

I get why people want machine-aided composition. But I'd love to see a project like this go in the opposite direction. Maybe put a row of buttons at the top: "I am [Loving it] [Grooving] [Fine] [A Bit Bored] [About to Quit]". Then use that (plus browser data and window-close data) to train ML models to maximize engagement. Or perhaps to hook it up to facial expression recognition. When I watch friends DJ, there's thi…

Put a camera on the crowd, and motion-track the bouncing of heads. That'll give you two banger metrics: one, how far they're all bouncing/jumping/nodding, and two, how consistently they are.

That would be enough to construct a robot DJ that could track the variations it was making, and rate them for 'better/worse'. Then you just make a cool-looking puppet to store the camera in, that can move around and possibly wave an actuator like a proper DJ, and the rest is machine learning.