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Waveloop: What Fable left me

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Re: Waveloop: What Fable left me

#61

Post by anamexis »

stavros wrote: post #48
anamexis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nutshell: An octave (for example from a C to the next C) is a doubling in frequency. In the Western diatonic system, there are 12 notes per octave. (C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B). Notes are "evenly spaced" within the octave - every note has the same ratio between its frequency and the frequency of the next note. Hence, that ratio is ¹²√2

Oh, that's the twelfth root of 2? That does make sense when you explain it like that, thank you. That's 12-TET, then?

Yes, exactly. 12-TET stands for 12 tone equal temperament, where "temperament" is a tuning system.

There are other tuning systems, which I intentionally avoided discussing because it starts involving LOTS more music theory very quickly. But to quickly describe it: pleasant sounding combinations of notes generally occur at simple ratios. If you look at a simple major chord, like C-E-G, the E would be at 5/4 the frequency of C, and the G would be at 3/2 the frequency of C. However if you tuned a piano like this, it would be specifically anchored to the root note of C, as that's what we're referencing those ratios from. (This would be "the key of C major.") It just so happens that in 12-TET tuning, we get ratios that are very close to these simple fractions, and since the tuning is "equal", it works for any key/root note.

Re: Waveloop: What Fable left me

#62

Post by soulofmischief »

n4r9 wrote: post #49
anamexis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nutshell: An octave (for example from a C to the next C) is a doubling in frequency. In the Western diatonic system, there are 12 notes per octave. (C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B). Notes are "evenly spaced" within the octave - every note has the same ratio between its frequency and the frequency of the next note. Hence, that ratio is ¹²√2

I always knew this but used to wonder why 12? , as I'm sure a lot of people did. It turns out of course to be a human choice, but the convenience of that choice can be codified mathematically. On a piano you move up an octave by going up by 8 white keys, or 12 semitones (white and black keys). Going up by 4 semitones is called a "major third", which multiplies the frequency of the note by 5/4. If you do three major t…

This is referred to as equal temperament, but one can also use just intonation. Each approach comes with tradeoffs and Western music mostly decided that equal temperament was worth it because instruments can play in any key without retuning.

Just intonation also suffers from harmonic issues when building certain chords, but the tradeoff is that there isn't "beating", or resonant pulsing due to frequency mismatches, since in equal temperament, the notes are slightly detuned in order to fit into the scale, as you've mentioned. Another benefit of just intonation is that it's been observed to be the instinctive intonation used by humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation

Re: Waveloop: What Fable left me

#63

Post by RugnirViking »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #8

Kinda interesting how its just like a FFT chart in a circle but perhaps the author is not aware that is the case. Would be curious to know what things were "implmentation details" for the fancy AI and what wasn't. I could be wrong but milkdrop already would do light FFT analysis for effects right?

I suggest you watch the explainer video the ai made, its pretty awesome, but yeah, thats exactly what it is, with some depth to how exactly it uses FFT, and solving some problems with getting good resolution on different frequencies

Re: Waveloop: What Fable left me

#64

Post by arcticbull »

RugnirViking wrote: post #58
arcticbull wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, note, everyone assumed it was going to be limited to citizens, but that's not what the government said. They put it under ITAR/EAR's US person definition which includes citizens, permanent residents, refugees and asylees. Basically only visa holders in the US were banned, and of course, people in foreign countries. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/part-772/section-772.1...

contrary to some people's intuitions, most people have never lived in or been to the united states.

... did you think that's what I was implying? I'm not even American my guy. I was adding clarification because the commenter I responded to claimed they had to be a US citizen to ride.

Re: Waveloop: What Fable left me

#65

Post by JHonaker »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #16

>The writing is also literary. It draws an analogy between the 12 musical pitch classes and the 12 markings on a clock. Noise lingers. Material surges off the rim. I absolutely hate this revolting writing style by LLMs

I physically cringed at both the quote and the surrounding section. The idea of this project is cool, but the amount of LLM glazing is bizarre.

Re: Waveloop: What Fable left me

#66

Post by soledades »

Did you consider some kind of arrangement of the notes that is less "equal-tempered", and that would highlight the harmonic relationship between the notes? probably would need to be key-specific.. or maybe rather now would you that fable is back?

Re: Waveloop: What Fable left me

#67

Post by tkgally »

stavros wrote: post #50
tkgally wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for reference, here is the metaprompt I first gave to Opus: “I want to ask Claude Code to write a browser-based synthesizer for me. Please prepare a prompt for it that I can give to it for it to write the synthesizer. The synthesizer should automatically create interesting polyphonic music in which the various voices play off against each other in both harmony and contrast. The controls will affect the tone, rhy…

You'd probably get better results giving the metaprompt to Fable. Information doesn't magically get created, running something through a dumb model to give to a smart model gets worse results than if you just give the smart model the prompt directly.

Now that Fable is back, I had it create two more browser-based music generators. For the first, I had Fable in chat write a full prompt based on the same metaprompt as above. Here is the prompt it wrote:

https://gally.net/temp/20260701_Fable_synthesizer_2_with_pro...

I then gave that full prompt to Fable in Claude Code. Here is the result:

https://gally.net/temp/20260701_Fable_synthesizer_2_with_pro...

For the second, I just gave a short prompt [1] directly to Fable in Claude Code. Here is that result:

https://gally.net/temp/20260701_Fable_synthesizer_3_with_dir...

I can’t say that one is better than the other; that would take a lot more tests, and the judgments would be pretty subjective in any case.

Both were completely one-shot. Last year, when I was doing similar tests with various models, the synthesizers rarely worked right on the first shot, and I would have to do some back-and-forth to get them functioning. This time, Fable was able to open the files in Chrome itself, view and adjust the page layout, and monitor the browser events for errors. Each time it made some adjustments to the file. The only thing it wasn’t able to do was listen to and assess the sounds produced.

[1] “Write a browser-based synthesizer for me. The synthesizer should automatically create interesting polyphonic music in which the various voices play off against each other in both harmony and contrast. The controls will affect the tone, rhythmic patterns, number of voices, complexity and randomness of the melodies, and other features. The controlled features should be original—not just standard synthesizer functions—and encourage creative explorations even by naive users.”

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