Live data from Hacker News

Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

blog.stackdump.com

21–26 of 26 posts

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#21
I don't know why they refer to these as Bjorklund rhythms - everyone else in the industry calls it Euclidean sequencing, and the person who popularized it is Godfried Toussaint.

There are a lot of Euclidean sequencing tools out there already, in both software and hardware. The premium offerings in the latter category are Elektron sequencers/ samplers/ synthesizers and the Oxi One, a pure MIDI sequencer. but there are many others. Euclidean sequencing is generally combined with things like conditional triggering (playing a note based on probability or a specific iteration of a loop or doing some sort of logic operation on another note in the sequence) and parameter locking (anchoring other parameters like velocity or control data to specific notes). I have the impression taht the authors of this project aren't very familiar with the electronic music marketplace, given that Euclidean sequencing is found even on budget gear now because it's so easy to implement and intuitive for musicians to exploit.

Incidentally, on Vivaldi (built on Chrome) this renders as black text on dark grey, making it nearly unreadable - probably because it's following system defaults, but I think a lot of people have system colors set dark by default.

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#24
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Parallel levels" is a nice way to put it. On a daw or drum machine, you have some sequence of notes or drum hits, that's one layer. And then you apply, say, 50% swing, that's another layer.

The "petri net" or "rhythm necklace" can compact this into a single layer of information. I think something similar can be achieved by using compound meter -- 12/8 instead of "4/4 with swung 1/8th notes" in standard notation, or using something other than the standard 16 steps on a drum machine.

My brain has always struggled with compound meter, somehow I just see a fraction should just be reduced. Much easier for me to imagine a grid that needs different levels of resolution in order to describe certain patterns.

Trying to learn independently, I've found much more difficulty in articulating why a given rhythm is so good, compared to the wealth of theory for understanding great melodies and harmonies.

So it's great to see others building tools and ideas around rhythm, it's a very deep and fun topic to explore.

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#25
Hello people!

Thanks for checking out my blog - yes it's heavily written by claude, and contains AI slop ;-)

I'm a lover of petri-nets this was my most interesting experiment so far.

I do have another version of this post that shows a a vis each instrument as a petri-net.

https://blog.stackdump.com/posts/beats-launch-jambox - the 'stage' view shows a better viz.

NOTE: As you all have mentioned - this doesn't work well on phones - I would try this again with another non-browser framework, but the browser is a fun place to iterate w/ claude: Open to suggestions here

also : this project is open source https://github.com/stackdump/beats-bitwrap-io

I can answer any questions - this is almost 100% vibe coded app using claude code, and I do make use of a separate render farm using a headless chrome if I want reproducible builds.

Re: Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

#26

Hello people! Thanks for checking out my blog - yes it's heavily written by claude, and contains AI slop ;-) I'm a lover of petri-nets this was my most interesting experiment so far. I do have another version of this post that shows a a vis each instrument as a petri-net. https://blog.stackdump.com/posts/beats-launch-jambox - the 'stage' view shows a better viz. NOTE: As you all have mentioned - this doesn't work wel…

Also one of my motivations here was to see what we can do with completely deterministic generated beats - it relies only on a seed value (no AI etc)

I also created a schema.org compatible protocol for the file format for each generated tack

https://beats.bitwrap.io/schema/index.json

Post reply on HN