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What makes music sound “good?”
- ChuckMcM 10y agoI started thinking about computer music generation when I met Peter Langston (http://peterlangston.com/Papers/amc.pdf http://peterlangston.com/Papers/amc.pdf) who was contracting with Sun doing audio work on the original 'project green' star-9 device. There were many places where being able to play a tune of a typical "flavor" but royalty free was required. I just thought it would be nice to have continuously variable music on hold.
- mehwoot 10y agoI find it remarkable how musical the final result sounds. Actually I find it remarkable how unmusical it sounds- when studying music theory there are often very simple rules you're mostly meant to follow, yet I've never heard any computer generated music that sounds even close to passable. It seems surprising to me, I would have thought it would be easier.
- Dove 10y agoI am not too surprised. I think these efforts are like trying to get computers to write essays by following established rules for writing style. They can follow those rules well enough, and so they don't sound like complete amateurs . . . but at the same time, they aren't saying anything. Which is exactly how computer generated music sounds to me. Pleasant enough, superficially, but with no real content.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lintroller 10y agoDoes the computer generated music "compose" music based on music theory or by learning from other songs? Much like literature, music can be good because an artist tastefully broke the rules and typical norms. A song-writing algorithm full of rule breaking will not necessarily create a song that fits the bill of "good" music.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoEven the basic rules turn out to be very complicated. Core elements are often cliched, but getting from a cliched chord sequence to a complete piece/song that captures the imagination of listeners is very much harder than it looks. I've seen an expert systems for generating counterpoint that used a grammar with more than a hundred separate production rules, and still failed to generate interesting bass lines. Interesting music is extremely non-trivial. Conversely, trivial algos used in trivial ways reliably produce trivial output.
- DefaultUserHN 10y ago>an artist tastefully broke the rules Tastefully. That's the biggest problem with computers.
- PeterisP 10y agoSure, that's the big problem in automation of many endeavours - we can automate things where it's objectively clear what's right and wrong, however if the criteria for "good X" is literally "X that humans would like" (e.g. all art) then you pretty much need a human in the loop, or try to simulate a human listener as opposed to a human composer. If we had a magical black box oracle that could tell us that variation A is "5 good" and variation B is "5.5 good", then that would be sufficient to implement a system that makes a lot of great art. But we don't, and possibly can't without strong AI or something like that.
- mannykannot 10y agoDavid Cope seemed to do pretty well: https://psmag.com/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-620e5aead47e#.lx1mlqksa https://psmag.com/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-620e5aead47... IIRC the samples sounded good to me, but I have been unable to play them now to refresh my memory.
- kbaker 10y agoEmily Howell is the name of the program. Some examples: Track 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEjdiE0AoCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEjdiE0AoCU Fugue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLR-_c_uCwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLR-_c_uCwI Here's the first CD produced: https://youtu.be/A9XCexln6xY?list=PLUSRfoOcUe4a-4pXqqET9DkPnp5DJYl0h https://youtu.be/A9XCexln6xY?list=PLUSRfoOcUe4a-4pXqqET9DkPn...
- goldenkey 10y agoThe fugue does a very good job of making me cry
- zhemao 10y agoI think the missing element is repetition. Human-generated music uses repetition a lot. If not in the melody, at least in the harmonic progression or rhythm. This algorithm doesn't seem to attempt anything like thematic development or rhythmic drive. I wonder how it would sound if, instead of looking ahead only one chord, the algorithm instead generates randomly up to a certain period, then repeats what it just played with some slight perturbations.
- mturmon 10y agoAlthough I admit I did not listen to the recording, what you're saying reminded me of this article on the key relationship of repetition to music: https://aeon.co/essays/why-repetition-can-turn-almost-anything-into-music https://aeon.co/essays/why-repetition-can-turn-almost-anythi... In particular, the passage beginning: "Can music exist without repetition? Well, music is not a natural object and composers are free to flout any tendency that it seems to exhibit. Indeed, over the past century, a number of composers expressly began to avoid repetitiveness in their work...." The authors of the piece found that both amateur and highly knowledgeable listeners thought that modified versions of some pieces, in which repetition had been injected, were more persuasively musical. And the larger point is the very deep relationship between repetition and music.
- alsetmusic 10y ago> when studying music theory there are often very simple rules you're mostly meant to follow Agreed. Though truly breakthrough music is often about knowing when and how to break those rules. Some of the most timeless songs are the ones where the artist made an unexpected deviation that bent the rules in just the right way. It's something that only the very talented can pull off without doing so by accident.
- steveeq1 10y agoRay Kurzweil seems to have made a passable song using a computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4 Granted, I wouldn't say it's song of the year or anything, but it's definitely listenable. Does anyone know of his general approach in his software for writing music?
- getraf 10y agoI wonder if the people over at Brain.fm have seen this? After using the service for a while, I've found it fascinating how they've managed to turn "randomness into something recognizably musical" (I'm quoting Dmitri Tymoczko) that I can then use to focus with.
- dharlow 10y agoIt's a large library of human-recorded loops, mixed and matched together at random. There's essentially nothing in the way of automated music composition.
- grimgrin 10y agoI just bought a Roland JD-XI and not having an understanding of music theory I was looking for anything that talked about What Sounds Good and Why. I'd like to read more without really diving into music theory too far.
- empath75 10y agoIf you want to make music, but don't care about music theory, get a book called The Art of Mixing. It won't tell you how to write a song, but it'll start you with a solid foundation for music production. You can start by just finding loops and samples online and putting tracks together that way. Then you can start replacing bits with original music. Think of it like learning how to program by cutting and pasting code from stack exchange. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Mixing-Recording-Engineering-Production/dp/1931140456 https://www.amazon.com/Art-Mixing-Recording-Engineering-Prod...
- spudlyo 10y agoI enjoyed reading the HookTheory[1] eBook and got a lot out of it. It illustrates its numerous examples using a neat colored notation visualizer, and does a great job explaining melody and functional harmony. It plays simple piano midi to illustrate concepts using popular songs. There were quizzes every few pages to test your knowledge, which I found fun. There are some insights to be found here based lots of data they've gathered from analyzing popular song chord progressions. My only complaint is that the audio playback has annoying zero-crossing pops. [1] https://www.hooktheory.com/music-theory-for-songwriting https://www.hooktheory.com/music-theory-for-songwriting
- stephenboyd 10y agoIt's an endlessly expansive topic, but usually people start out with: 1) Lessons or books on how to play a specific instrument. The good ones will cover the most relevant basics of music theory--stuff like chords, scales, keys, and voice leading. 2) Learning how to play your favorite songs. Copying performances and then experimenting with variations on them is essential for getting an intuitive sense of how it all works.
- tzmudzin 10y ago
- Houshalter 10y agoI'm a fan of Juergen Schmidhuber's theory: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html The idea is that the brain finds it pleasing to learn things. It effectively seeks novelty. Repetitive, predictable music does not sound pleasing. Pure randomness also does not sound pleasing. Somewhere in between is novelty. Patterns that are definitely real, but new. That somehow violate your brains expectations.
- tonyhb 10y agoAnecdotal but I feels as if that goes against standard chord progression, keys, and almost all EDM. Blues has a fairly strict formula in which most songs follow. Most songs are in 4/4, and most modern music sounds fairly similar yet people are really into it.
- cynicalkane 10y agoThere's far more to musical creativity than chord sequences and time signatures. Blues is made interesting by the musical ability of the performers.
- arthur_pryor 10y agoit's almost mystifying to me at this point that not everyone's on board with this idea. most of what i care about musically is captured poorly by the traditional notation of western classical music.
- dschiptsov 10y agoEvolutionary accident, perhaps. We have been conditioning for millions of years to detect dangers and distinguish among sounds of nature. Obviously, the sounds of bird songs and most of animal cries are in so-called major tonality, while sounds of nature like wind, raining, thunderstorm, etc. are belongs to minor. The swinging from one to another and variations on a theme are pleasant to us the way natural bright colors are more pleasant than dull ones. Rhythm is another main factor, and it probably has something to do with repetitive patterns of behavior, the physiological phenomena behind some trance states (which is related to sexual arousal that makes an animal numb) and rhythms found in sounds of nature. But, of course, it has nothing to do with harmonic series and other man-made concepts of the mind.
- acjohnson55 10y agoI first heard of Dmitri Tymoczko from his book A Geometry of Music [1], which I found to be very enlightening. This is a cool demo, although I suppose it shows a bit more where the basic texture of western music comes from than songwriting. But what I find most interesting about his ideas is how he's able to fairly convincingly connect them to the entire western music tradition. [1] http://dmitri.tymoczko.com/geometry-of-music.html http://dmitri.tymoczko.com/geometry-of-music.html (there's a link to Amazon from that page)
- arthur_pryor 10y agofor most of the examples on that page, the first feeling i had was that it sounded like a naive/paint-by-numbers version of free jazz/modern classical/a tense passage in a movie score. i thought the last clip was actually enjoyable, the busy clattering noisy one with the effects and the variety of instrument sounds. there's plenty of weird electronic music i listen to that's in that ballpark at times. these clips would all make fine sample fodder. i appreciate the attempted disclaimer at the end ('That is, "good" to typical Western listeners'). but i think a lot of typical western listeners don't realize how much things like texture (timbre, whatever) and other sorts of things not easily captured by western classical music notation matter to them. for instance, a lot of what makes old jazz sound like old jazz is that great warm scratchy sound that the recording technology of the time necessarily imprinted on the original recordings. likewise, if you scored autechre or aphex twin and got an orchestra to play it, it might sound interesting or enjoyable, but it wouldn't sound anything like autechre or aphex twin. and of course, the intonation and cadence and syllable stretching of well delivered rap vocals or well executed vocal sample chopping is nothing if not musical, but those things aren't easily transcribed by the notation in question here either. but those are all things regularly enjoyed by a wide swath of western listeners. so i think the disclaimer should be more like 'That is, "good" to the Western classical music establishment.'
- pjdorrell 10y agoOne hypothesis is that music has evolved to be "difficult" to compose, because too much really good music would be bad for us: http://whatismusic.info/blog/OnTheDifficultyOfMusic.html http://whatismusic.info/blog/OnTheDifficultyOfMusic.html
- SNvD7vEJ 10y agoSort of a Lorem Ipsum in music. Listening to good music (as a non-musician) is for me mostly about experience emotions. Listening to this music leads immediately to be about identifying what rules the generator was programmed to follow. The stricter the rules (less random), the more music-like it may sound, but without any emotion. Except maybe comedy.
- Animats 10y agoThere was something else like this on HN a few months back, but I can't find it now. Like this generator, it generated music which sounded OK on a scale of seconds. Lacking any higher level structure, after tens of seconds it was clear the music wasn't going anywhere. This is like generating sentences with statistical autocomplete. For a few words, the phrases sort of make sense, but that illusion disappears with more length. More high-level structure is needed. Somebody will probably figure this out soon using deep learning and grind out background music for movies. Oh, right.[1][2][3][4] (Juke-bot may be a hoax.) [1] http://juke-bot.com/ http://juke-bot.com/ [2] https://www.jukedeck.com/ https://www.jukedeck.com/ [3] http://www.athtek.com/digiband.html http://www.athtek.com/digiband.html [4] http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/ http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/
- anotheryou 10y agoThat's what makes it sound "musical", not "good". A lot in music breaks down to establishing patterns and breaking them. Simpler music, like pop music relies heavily on well known patterns, but at least the chorus usually has some element of surprise within the song. My theory is, that people like music that is just a little (or for the more adventurous a little more) surprising. With training in listening to music, as a musician or just as an ambitious listener, your taste will begin to widen to more complex music. This is because you begin to recognize its patterns (and only when a pattern establishes, you can break it to create suspense or surprise). Simpler stuff will become very shallow, because it's so predictable (just remember the shameful musical taste when coming of age). Of course there is more to a pop song than harmony and melody, so even when your taste becomes more sophisticated you might like a pop song for its emotional appeal or some subtile complexity or depth the novice won't even notice.
- Leightus 10y agoI'm a fan of Juergen Schmidhuber's theory: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html The idea is that the brain finds it pleasing to learn things. It effectively seeks novelty. Repetitive, predictable music does not sound pleasing. Pure randomness also does not sound pleasing. Somewhere in between is novelty. Patterns that are definitely real, but new. That somehow violate your brains expectations.
- joebergeron 10y agoSome of these audio examples remind me of a long night my freshman year at MIT, when at around 7 AM, in delirium, my friend and I wrote a few hundred lines of code in Matlab, yes Matlab, to procedurally generate music by probabilistically moving from chord to chord based off of the frequency of such changes in real music. Added some bass for counterpoint and some terrible percussion synthesized from white noise and we had what we believed to be some real bangers.
- retox 10y agoAnd when you sobered up? :)
- joebergeron 10y agoQuickly realized the true nature of what we had created. (That is to say, piping hot garbage.)
- dahart 10y agoThere are some interesting tidbits here, and I really like the table of consistency versus consonance! But overall, isn't this saying that removing the randomness and applying known music theory is what makes music sound musical? Is there any insight that using the computer is uncovering? Randomness produces too much motion, and also fails to establish pattern or theme. A set of random major chords still sounds very random, it doesn't progress and leaves the listener unsatisfied. So many attempts at computer music start from randomness and the proceed to remove it little by little with structured rules -- maybe starting from randomness isn't the right place to start? Had a tiny epiphany about randomness recently when I edited a video with still photos in it and applied my computer's "Ken Burns" effect, where it zooms & pans slowly. The automatic version picks random start and end points, fairly close together, and the movement is slow and gentle. But I watched it and noticed it was very unfocused and adding unharmonious motion. Ken Burns is telling stories with his pans & zooms - zooming in to highlight a specific face he's talking about, or panning over to reveal a place. It was a pain to re-edit the video manually, and hand-animate every pan & zoom, but when I was done, I was completely shocked how much less motion there was, like an order of magnitude less movement. The randomness had just scattered everything and didn't go anywhere. That's what I'm hearing in these musical examples - Brownian motion - too much movement that doesn't go anywhere.