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Show HN: I made some ambient music generators that run in your browser

flowful.app

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Re: Show HN: I made some ambient music generators that run in your browser

#71

Post by julian55 »

phailhaus wrote: post #67
fredley wrote: post #63

Love this. A project I've had in mind for a while but realistically will never get around to building is an ambient/coding music generator that's hooked up to a metric, e.g. your project's latency, autoscale size, error rate, potentially controlling different instruments. It would be fun to be able to subconsciously monitor your system without staring at graphs.

A long time ago, a friend mentioned this exact same idea! The analogy he used was how steam engine operators became so familiar with their machines that they could tell what was going on just by listening. I'm not sure if we can really do the same with services, but it's a fun thought experiment.

At one place I worked at back in the 1970s there was a speaker on the mainframe (it may have just been a transistor radio picking up interference) and you could get some idea of what the machine was doing from the sound.

Re: Show HN: I made some ambient music generators that run in your browser

#72

Post by m0llusk »

XCSme wrote: post #30
m0llusk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest differentiator may be the infinite length of tracks. Once you tune into something that fits it can be left going as long as necessary. With other services there is a need to compose play lists or restart the player when a selection ends.

Most services have a "radio" station based on that song/genre that gives you almost endless listening time for that type of content.

Such offerings have discontinuities between tracks or beat matched transitions. These generated tracks are constructed to continue with the same themes and sounds as long as wanted. It may or may not be desirable, but it is different.

Re: Show HN: I made some ambient music generators that run in your browser

#74

Post by cubano »

green-eclipse wrote: post #57

Absolutely love this concept. One issue I'm having after listening for a while to a variety of the channels is that the music is all pretty "sad." I don't know enough about music theory to give you more detail than that, but is there a way you can add more upbeat songs, to get my mood up, energy up, motivation kicking in? Listening to these, I kind of want to take a nap.

Introducing major key based songs would do a lot to improve the mood of the music.

In general, major keys are used for a lot of pop music...for example, both the Beatles and Nirvana wrote almost all their hits using major keys (Let It Be and Smells Like Teen Spirit), while ballads and more sad and "moody" music (ie Stairway to Heaven/Zeppelin and Unforgiven/Metallica) will be written in minors.

Also, tempo is important to add to the"upbeatness" of a piece...it would an interesting addition to this wonderful program to add switches for major/minor key and tempo.

Re: Show HN: I made some ambient music generators that run in your browser

#75

Post by printscreen »

aikah wrote: post #73

Nice, this is why I browse HN for. Can you tell use more about the tech involved? Perfect for a daily meditation.

Sure thing. Further down in another comment I went into how the music is made, so I'll stick to the tech stack here.

The frontend is built with React, Chakra UI and Tailwind CSS. It also does all of the audio generation using a scheduling library called Tone.js.

Auth / Database are handled by Firebase, and payments are by Stripe. It's fully serverless; I use cloud functions for anything server side.

The samples themselves are stored in Google Cloud Storage, although I may need to look into a different method or making it more efficient, as today's traffic has absolutely smashed through the free downloads tier.

Re: Show HN: I made some ambient music generators that run in your browser

#76

Post by printscreen »

ComputerCat wrote: post #69

Oh wow, I like this! Question: if I want to go back and change my selections from the first question about what I normally listen to, how do I do that?

uhh, right now.. it's not the most user friendly. You can delete the fields that the site places in your localStorage (can be done by clearing your cache for this site).

The selections from the question just decide a) what's in your recommended section and b) what category you start on when you first load the app.

Re: Show HN: I made some ambient music generators that run in your browser

#78

Post by printscreen »

Rochus wrote: post #34
printscreen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just updated the FAQ ( https://flowful.app/faq ) but will post here also: I record a bunch of samples from VSTs I have. Once I have the samples I upload them to a server, which you request when you load up a song. In your browser, the generators (which is another way of saying 'tracks') then piece together these samples in ways I have coded. So for example, I might have a list of chords which sound good, and a loop…

Interesting, thanks; so these "samples" are not just the sounds which are triggered by a (Midi) track, but are the music themselves; in that case the "generator" just selects and combines pre-existing musical parts; it's not an "ab initio" music generator as we saw e.g. in MuseNet or BachBot; it's rather a kind of "automated DJ".

Yeah that's not a bad way of putting it. Each musical part will use the samples in a different way each time though, with some randomness added, so it hopefully stops things from being too recognisable.

Re: Show HN: I made some ambient music generators that run in your browser

#80

Post by printscreen »

fredley wrote: post #63

Love this. A project I've had in mind for a while but realistically will never get around to building is an ambient/coding music generator that's hooked up to a metric, e.g. your project's latency, autoscale size, error rate, potentially controlling different instruments. It would be fun to be able to subconsciously monitor your system without staring at graphs.

That's a cool idea. Something that was suggested to me with Flowful was to use some sort of body triggers, perhaps from facial recgonition through your device's camera, to determine when the user was becoming less focused. The music could then adapt to help them get back on track.

So many cool possibilities.

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