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Music Mouse

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Re: Music Mouse

#31

Post by runlevel1 »

lioeters wrote: post #2

It's a modern Web Audio implementation of this Mac software from 1986 (last updated in 2004). Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629172536fw_/http://retiary... (Archived because the original site is quite slow: http://retiary.org/ls/programs.html ) It was written by Laurie Spiegel, a composer and early pioneer in electronic music. > Music Mouse is an algorithmic musical composi…

Laurie Spiegel is a Bell Labs alum. Bell Labs is the nexus for so many remarkable people.

A bit off-topic, but does anyone know of a book that touches on how Bell Labs managed to recruit and foster so many great minds?

Re: Music Mouse

#32

Post by trynewideas »

By total chance, this revealed a flaw with my mouse that's been haunting me for months.

My right mouse button intermittently doesn't bring up context menus, which I seemingly confirmed by recording the screen and visualizing click events in a presentation mode. It would show what looked like one right click, but no context menu, or a context menu that appeared and was immediately dismissed.

But this revealed that it's actually rapidly sending multiple logical clicks per physical click. The logical clicks are fast enough that the screen recordings didn't differentiate them as separate events - which sent me in the wrong direction, making me think the OS was disregarding clicks. But here, the multiple clicks are clearly audible.

So thanks!

Re: Music Mouse

#33

Post by robinsonb5 »

trynewideas wrote: post #32

By total chance, this revealed a flaw with my mouse that's been haunting me for months. My right mouse button intermittently doesn't bring up context menus, which I seemingly confirmed by recording the screen and visualizing click events in a presentation mode. It would show what looked like one right click, but no context menu, or a context menu that appeared and was immediately dismissed. But this revealed that it'…

I've had this problem on so many mice over the years, going back to the Amiga days. Often it can be fixed by opening the mouse and gluing a tiny bit of thin card to the nub which presses on the microswitch. (Usually the problem is just that the plastic has worn down over the years and no longer pushes the button quite far enough to make a clean contact.)

Re: Music Mouse

#34

Post by robinsonb5 »

I had low expectations for this when I clicked the link and saw the spinny-rotatey loading ring (which for informational sites usually portends a wasted journey) - but I have to say this is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time! I think an FPGA-based implementation of this or something similar might end up on my projects list in the not too distant future...

Re: Music Mouse

#35

Post by dmix »

lioeters wrote: post #2

It's a modern Web Audio implementation of this Mac software from 1986 (last updated in 2004). Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629172536fw_/http://retiary... (Archived because the original site is quite slow: http://retiary.org/ls/programs.html ) It was written by Laurie Spiegel, a composer and early pioneer in electronic music. > Music Mouse is an algorithmic musical composi…

Love that website. Was this sold in stores?

Re: Music Mouse

#36

Post by dmix »

wantsanagent wrote: post #25

Wow, this is probably the most intuitively enjoyable music tool I've ever used. I'm not a musician and I know very little about what makes music good, but playing with this tool felt like I was hearing a better version of my own imagination. Like those scenes in movies where people can suddenly play music and have no idea how they're doing it.

It's rare to have an instrument where anything you do sounds good!

Re: Music Mouse

#37

Post by isatty »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #33
trynewideas wrote: post #32

By total chance, this revealed a flaw with my mouse that's been haunting me for months. My right mouse button intermittently doesn't bring up context menus, which I seemingly confirmed by recording the screen and visualizing click events in a presentation mode. It would show what looked like one right click, but no context menu, or a context menu that appeared and was immediately dismissed. But this revealed that it'…

I've had this problem on so many mice over the years, going back to the Amiga days. Often it can be fixed by opening the mouse and gluing a tiny bit of thin card to the nub which presses on the microswitch. (Usually the problem is just that the plastic has worn down over the years and no longer pushes the button quite far enough to make a clean contact.)

Interesting, I’d expect mice to come with hardware debounce by default.

Re: Music Mouse

#38

Post by ChadNauseam »

shubhamjain wrote: post #12

As a person with no knowledge of music theory, I am amazed how the music produced here, even with completely random mouse movements, still sounds decent—even a bit pleasing, if I may. Certainly better than hitting keys randomly on a piano as an amateur. How does that happen? Is it just about the tempo, and how space between two notes has been programmatically defined?

Music theory is an amazing subject. You can actually make random notes sound reasonably musical by constraining them to just a few simple rules. Copy/pasting from Dmitri Tymoczko's Music 105 lecture notes:

1. Conjunct melodic motion. Melodies tend to move by short distances from note to note. Large leaps sound inherently unmelodic.

2. Harmonic consistency. The chords in a passage of music, whatever they may be, tend to be structurally similar to one another.

3. Acoustic consonance. Some chords sound intrinsically good or pleasing. These are said to be consonant.

4. Scales. Over small spans of musical time (say 30 seconds or so), most musical styles tend to use just a few types of notes, between 5 to 8.

5. Centricity. Over moderate spans of musical time, one tonic note is heard as being more prominent than the others, appearing more frequently and serving as a goal of musical motion.

(Not to say that everything that sounds musical follows these rules, just that if you follow these rules the output is likely to sound musical.)

Re: Music Mouse

#39

Post by codazoda »

tkam wrote: post #14

Nice! One problem: There's digital clipping. I suspect that the four samples are normalized individually, and when playing at the same time the transients add up to over 0dB. On quality headphones (beyerdynamic dt770 for me) it is quite audible. It happens with the piano and the synth sample, but is more audible with the piano sample.

Is that the sort of "scratch" or "crunch" I hear from my Sennheiser HD 4.50's or is it something else?

At first, I didn't even notice it, but now I went back to listen more carefully. I'm not sure if my headphones are "quality" or not but they are the most expensive set I've ever owned.

I hear no clipping (like sudden silence) at the end of notes, even if I wait a long time. But, my ears are not tuned.

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