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Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

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Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#11

Post by jrajav »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #4

I see so many people try to reinvent sequencing as a circular diagram, as opposed to (say) a piano roll that loops, and I see little to no advantage to it. It's a cool novelty, but not the type of thing you'd like to work on. Horizontal (left-to-right) sequencer displays like a piano roll or step sequencer are far more compact to display and easier to read. For drums parts, it's one dimensional until you add a second…

I make beats with Patterning on iPad all the time. It's a fantastic sequencing surface. The main advantage over a traditional horizontal sequencer is that time at the measure level is represented much more naturally (as a loop), which makes polyrhythms and track offsets (both common when putting together more interesting sounding, swung beats) easier to visualize and manipulate with confidence. It's also arguably a bit easier to visually reason about symmetry / 'rhyming' across beats, when making step changes - a much more minor improvement but noticeable to me (I'm highly visual).

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#12

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

tleb_ wrote: post #7
jarth9 wrote: post #3

Compared to other ways of writing down musical rhythm, I've found this to be a very nice balance of simplicity and expressiveness. Standard notation and drum sequencers have a lot of ambiguity (at least to my non-expert ear) when it comes to swing, microtiming, groove, and the other little things that we think of that make a rhythm attractive. Godfried T. Toussaint has given this idea a full academic exploration. He…

Can you clarify how this better helps express swing compared to a piano roll?

You're not sequencing notes you're sequencing multiple parallel levels of musical information which are eventually rendered as notes.

One of those levels could be context-related microtiming - the context being position in the bar, or the actual shape of the phrase, the position in the phrase, and so on.

This isn't sequencing in the classical sense, it's generative composition.

It's not popular because it's much more abstract and harder to work with than "Play this pattern."

There's a lot of unexplored potential in deterministic systems that work with music at these more abstract levels.

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#13

Post by tessierashpool »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #4

I see so many people try to reinvent sequencing as a circular diagram, as opposed to (say) a piano roll that loops, and I see little to no advantage to it. It's a cool novelty, but not the type of thing you'd like to work on. Horizontal (left-to-right) sequencer displays like a piano roll or step sequencer are far more compact to display and easier to read. For drums parts, it's one dimensional until you add a second…

> In the end, the proof is in the pudding: How good is the music made with the tool?

hating on OP for being AI slop is fully legit imo (sorry OP) but don't judge the concept on this example. the rotary sequencer model's actually quite effective. there's lots of niche software and Eurorack modules which implement it, e.g., Moskwa (and Moskwa II) from Xaoc Devices.

here's a YouTube video which shows Moskwa II in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-6n_E9WIfQ

btw the first rotary sequencer was probably Raymond Scott's Circle Machine from 1958:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110927232227/http://raymondsco...

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#14

Post by m_kos »

jrajav wrote: post #11
Slow_Hand wrote: post #4

I see so many people try to reinvent sequencing as a circular diagram, as opposed to (say) a piano roll that loops, and I see little to no advantage to it. It's a cool novelty, but not the type of thing you'd like to work on. Horizontal (left-to-right) sequencer displays like a piano roll or step sequencer are far more compact to display and easier to read. For drums parts, it's one dimensional until you add a second…

I make beats with Patterning on iPad all the time. It's a fantastic sequencing surface. The main advantage over a traditional horizontal sequencer is that time at the measure level is represented much more naturally (as a loop), which makes polyrhythms and track offsets (both common when putting together more interesting sounding, swung beats) easier to visualize and manipulate with confidence. It's also arguably a b…

I enjoy Patterning too. One limitation of that representation is that it doesn't seem to lend itself to working with loops that evolve over time. I don't know if it could be accomplished by some isometric view of stacked wheels (patterns) or a slinky, but maybe a Petri Net?

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#15

Post by m_kos »

fwip wrote: post #5

What's the value of modeling these as petri nets instead of a regular sequencer? I was expecting some sort of branching, or at least multiple tokens per ring, but I can't figure out how to set that up. Also - is it just me, or is delivery weirdly off-beat sometimes? Like, isolating to just the kick drums in a standard 4-on-the-floor techno song, it has almost a disorienting amount of delay on some of the beats.

> is it just me, or is delivery weirdly off-beat sometimes?

I played with it for a while and implementation is perhaps not the strongest aspect of this project.

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#16

Post by kennywinker »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #4

I see so many people try to reinvent sequencing as a circular diagram, as opposed to (say) a piano roll that loops, and I see little to no advantage to it. It's a cool novelty, but not the type of thing you'd like to work on. Horizontal (left-to-right) sequencer displays like a piano roll or step sequencer are far more compact to display and easier to read. For drums parts, it's one dimensional until you add a second…

The only flaw i see in your reasoning is trying to optimize a creative process. Piano rolls may be technically better, but since the majority of music is made with a piano roll you can use other types of interfaces to break out of the mental ruts a piano roll creates in your thinking. Music making isn't about best - it’s about creativity and inspiration and lateral thinking.

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#17

Post by ericwood »

fwip wrote: post #5

What's the value of modeling these as petri nets instead of a regular sequencer? I was expecting some sort of branching, or at least multiple tokens per ring, but I can't figure out how to set that up. Also - is it just me, or is delivery weirdly off-beat sometimes? Like, isolating to just the kick drums in a standard 4-on-the-floor techno song, it has almost a disorienting amount of delay on some of the beats.

Browsers intentionally add jitter to timing methods like setTimeout and setInterval to avoid fingerprinting and other side channel style attacks. When I've messed with building in-browser sequencers in the past you had to use a webworker with the clock that sends messages back to the main event loop, although I'm sure there's reasons that won't work these days either.

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#18

Post by testaccount28 »

some candid feedback for claude:

    - the demo on the page makes no sound and is visibly off (triggers happen when the token is at the wrong location, or not at all)
    - the demo video is boring
    - it doesn't even _do the thing_? it's just a 1d piano roll in a circle? there's no fun petri net dynamics?
(who is upvoting this?)

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#20

Post by leothetechguy »

Music in the Field of Music should always come first. Sorry for the bluntness but I listen to the demo for 10 seconds and it sounds... shit. Really shit. Then I look at who made it and it looks like someone shoving a data structure into a field they know little about for the sake of the data structure itself?
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