Live data from Hacker News

Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

overtone-recipes.github.io

11–20 of 101 posts

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#11
post #2

Haha. This is awesome. I wonder what the final output would be. A full song?

Think of it more as emulating a recording studio (instruments, amps, effects the whole thing) modeled as code.

This works beautifully in the composition first paradigm of lisps/clojure. The APIs are a bit hard to wrap your head around if you intend to use Overtone for the entire production process but I've had lots of fun with using it as the mother of all synthesis engine

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#12
Not knowing about Leipzig[0], I've been trying to come up with my own representation of music in JS to work with the Web Audio API. My biggest puzzle so far is how to a) keep a rhythm and b) allow musical "blocks", which are indeterminate in length, to fit into this rhythm. I was thinking that these blocks would be pre-defined functions which represent different aspects of music (bassline, riff, etc.) which could be repeated and inserted at arbitrary time in the composition.

If anyone is interested on working on this drop me a pm/comment (it's just for fun)

[0]https://github.com/ctford/leipzig

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#15
post #3

Well that's opened up a fascinating new world to me. Is there a name for that regular logarithmic by linear music notation in the first image? I suddenly feel like a whole lifetime of musical enjoyment has been denied to me by the utterly utterly ridiculous staff notation system.

I agree. I used to compose small pieces with soundtrackers [1] and it was a lot of fun. However, I've never been able to learn staff notation system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Soundtracker

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#16
post #2

Haha. This is awesome. I wonder what the final output would be. A full song?

I was a bit disappointed by the output. Is this the quality of music that is produced regularly by this software? The only thing that sounded good to my ears was the baseline piece, by itself. It sounded true to the original. The rest sounded like a Casio keyboard from the 80s. Not flattering to the depth of Da Funk. I was expecting something closer to the original, not something with the same tones measures and BPM but sounding totally flat overall. Granted, this is my only exposure to music produced by this software. I wonder if there are other examples, that don't sound like a computer making music? Fruity Loops makes better music than this.

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#17
post #3

Well that's opened up a fascinating new world to me. Is there a name for that regular logarithmic by linear music notation in the first image? I suddenly feel like a whole lifetime of musical enjoyment has been denied to me by the utterly utterly ridiculous staff notation system.

It's a representation of a midi step sequencer. It's pretty standard in all DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software. Staff notation is way more nuanced than this. In order to represent all the details on the midi ui it requires layers (like photoshop) for all the different parameters. On staff notation it's all there on one page. Staff notation might be a bigger learning curve but it's also a far superior way of com…

I recall some composers notes such as 'with great vigor' or 'like raindrops' on sheet music. Midi step sequences would have a hard time representing the "emotion" some composers are looking for.

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a representation of a midi step sequencer. It's pretty standard in all DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software. Staff notation is way more nuanced than this. In order to represent all the details on the midi ui it requires layers (like photoshop) for all the different parameters. On staff notation it's all there on one page. Staff notation might be a bigger learning curve but it's also a far superior way of com…

I recall some composers notes such as 'with great vigor' or 'like raindrops' on sheet music. Midi step sequences would have a hard time representing the "emotion" some composers are looking for.

Because a machine is playing, so as with any computer code, you have to formalise everything and leave nothing implicit.

Re: Recreating Daft Punk's Da Funk with Overtone and Leipzig

#19
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall some composers notes such as 'with great vigor' or 'like raindrops' on sheet music. Midi step sequences would have a hard time representing the "emotion" some composers are looking for.

Because a machine is playing, so as with any computer code, you have to formalise everything and leave nothing implicit.

So much of the notation is not codified, and is part of the artistry of the musician. Even if all those Italian/French words are included (martele, staccato, largo, et al.), and crescendos and ritards and are marked, one cannot play the tune from sight with the desired emotion without first hearing it or playing it over and over.
Post reply on HN