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Generating Music (with an algorithm)

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Re: Generating Music (with an algorithm)

#41
post #14
post #4

I've been wondering how long it would be until web sites like this started showing up, where you can listen to automatically generated music on demand. Hopefully they keep improving until they make the best human composers look mediocre, despite being millions of times faster. Unbounded amounts of new high quality low cost music? Yes please.

Have you seen DarwinTunes? ( http://darwintunes.org/ )

Just checked it out, very interesting concept. But from what I heard the music doesn't seem to be evolving much!

Re: Generating Music (with an algorithm)

#42
There are at least two major areas of music composition which the algorythmic attempts fall vastly short of humans.

One is that real music composition is never done where the timbres are separated from the composition. Classically notated music looks kind of like this, but it's really just a shorthand. A composer knows intimately the sounds she is working with.

For pop music, the timbre itself is a mode of creative expression. Innovation in musical timbres and sounds is an expected part of pop music. (I'm using "pop" in the most general sense, covering a large amount of contemporary genres). The meaning of the music is not captured by simplistic reference to musical notation concepts.

The other major limitation of generated music, to my ears, is that of overall compositional structure. The units of composition usually are short, and only locally referenced. So the compositions lack interesting shape over the course of time.

If you think of a composition as a story, it's as if a bunch of plausible paragraph that are coherent within them selves are strung together with only loose reference to each other. So a longer "plot" doesn't emerge.

Re: Generating Music (with an algorithm)

#43
The best one I've ever heard was AlgoMusic[0] on the Amiga by Thomas Schürger. I used to spend hours listening to it. And it was a pleasant surprise while searching for it now, to find out that the author has a brand new project called SoundHelix[1] that has all the awesomeness of AlgoMusic, and sounds even more incredible. You should listen to the examples[2].

[0]: http://aminet.net/package/mus/misc/AlgoMusic2_4

[1]: http://www.soundhelix.com/

[2]: http://www.soundhelix.com/audio-examples

Re: Generating Music (with an algorithm)

#44
post #4

I've been wondering how long it would be until web sites like this started showing up, where you can listen to automatically generated music on demand. Hopefully they keep improving until they make the best human composers look mediocre, despite being millions of times faster. Unbounded amounts of new high quality low cost music? Yes please.

We still haven't really solved the problem of getting a digital piano to sound anything like a Steinway Concert Grand. Even if we could replace artistic expression with algorithm in this instance, the instrument sound itself has miles to go as well, and may well never be replicated with the precision that a true piano has.

Re: Generating Music (with an algorithm)

#45
post #4

I've been wondering how long it would be until web sites like this started showing up, where you can listen to automatically generated music on demand. Hopefully they keep improving until they make the best human composers look mediocre, despite being millions of times faster. Unbounded amounts of new high quality low cost music? Yes please.

We still haven't really solved the problem of getting a digital piano to sound anything like a Steinway Concert Grand. Even if we could replace artistic expression with algorithm in this instance, the instrument sound itself has miles to go as well, and may well never be replicated with the precision that a true piano has.

Have you heard of Pianoteq? http://www.pianoteq.com/

Re: Generating Music (with an algorithm)

#47

I took part in a "create a game in a day" event recently. Some of the compositions sounded like they would have been perfect for the game, which leads to the strange question: what is the copyright on music composed by the algorithm?

Creative Commons is the one I picked

Re: Generating Music (with an algorithm)

#49
post #48

Man, that is some pretty crappy music. Good effort though. Algorithm needs more theory. Good music isn't that random. You are missing phrasing, repetition, rhythm.

I'm not missing it - all three things are encoded there. They might not be that "visible", which is a point of improvement, but the theory is there. As I wrote in the blog "random" generates noise. That's why composition rules are needed.
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