Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

vitling.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 257 posts

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

#221

Post by smoe »

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.)

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.

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

#222

Post by scriptkiddy »

diydsp wrote: post #169
stinos wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

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

#223

Post by Digit-Al »

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…

I'm not entirely convinced by your argument. Some years ago there was an episode of the Gadget Show where they were testing an app for suggesting food ideas. I can't remember how it was supposed to work, it was too long ago, but it was something to do with having profiles of different food types programmed into it and then it used some sort of algorithm to compare taste profiles and come up with combinations that should work.

The combination it came up with that they then tried selling on a food stall was chocolate on pizza. It wasn't to everybody's taste but some liked it, with one describing it as "weirdly delicious".

It doesn't seem completely ridiculous that if an AI could be trained to recognise patterns of music that worked well together that it could analyse a large corpus of recorded music and come up with surprising mixes that you wouldn't think would work, but do.

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

#225

Post by spiralganglion »

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…

Agreed, but I'd like to take it a step further. Rather than fitting new compositional ideas into the patterns and structures of our existing music theories, I'd like to use computation to create new theories.

As an example, I've become really interested in the fact that tempo and meter are taken as constant, grid-like structures in pretty much all existing music practices (even within, say, Gamelan, though there you do get a lot of pushing and pulling). Typically, you have polyrhythms and polymeters to fit more interesting patterns into the fixed grid, and accelerando and ritardando to adjust the rate of grid traversal, but that's about it. Hardly anyone applies algorithmic/geometric thinking to the grid itself — likely because more complex rhythmic foundations would make human performance nigh impossible.

To explore this space, I created my own little generative music system that takes a handful of simple motifs (a la Riley or Reich) and stacks them into a recursive temporal structure, which is then pushed logarithmically toward a tempo of 0 or infinity. There are some rules so that the "performers" only play at comprehensible scales, and that pitch modulation keeps the piece interesting to a listener. You can listen to it here, if you'd like: https://ivanish.ca/diminished-fifth/

I'd love to see more folks working on tools to make these sorts of theory-stretching ideas easier to access and explore. For instance, I've really been struggling with how to hand-compose music that can fit within a nonlinear/recursive structure of time. Existing tools like Tidal or Max/Pd were built to support the existing theory. I think we need new tools that allow you to design the theory itself.

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

#226

Post by polypodiopsi »

diydsp wrote: post #169
stinos wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

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

#227

Post by polypodiopsi »

bzzzt wrote: post #111
stinos wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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...

theres a whole genre working with these methods of analog aleatory sound generation (harsh noise)

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

#228

Post by qvrjuec »

krrishd wrote: post #177

pretty cool, i’m tangentially reminded of https://jaipaul.bronze.ai/ > This version of Jasmine by Jai Paul is created using the BRONZE AI engine. On each listen, Bronze performs a unique and infinite playback of the piece. Bronze is a new technology that allows music creators to utilise AI and machine learning as creative tools for composition and arrangement. Bronze is also an audio file format which will revolution…

I was kind of disappointed by the OP's link because of the bar that this Jai Paul/Bronze track had set for me. Thanks for sharing this!

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

#229

Post by polypodiopsi »

stinos wrote: post #96
sideshowb wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

I feel like kodwo eshuns early writing on the drug tech interface is relevant to this conversation: http://ccru.net/swarm3/3_abducted.htm
Post reply on HN