4 ms·

I don't disagree with this observation, but I wanted to mention a counterpoint. Eno's "Music for Airports" famously uses a system of multiple tape loops that p

I don't disagree with this observation, but I wanted to mention a counterpoint. Eno's "Music for Airports" famously uses a system of multiple tape loops that produce sequences of different periods. As you listen, you can hear phrases that occur nearly together and then later, well-separated in time, as the periods of these loops go in and out of phase: "One of the notes repeats every 23 1/2 seconds. It is in fact a long loop running around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank's studio. The next lowest loop repeats every 25 7/8 seconds or something like that. The third one every 29 15/16 seconds or something. What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable — they are not likely to come back into sync again." This interaction of periods will have long memory. (If the tape lengths are L and L+d, for small d, then the repeat time could easily be as long as L*(L/d), and even longer if d does not divide L evenly.) Thus, it is very different from what you get with a Markov chain.

twic 8y ago
There was an interview with Eno in Wired in 1995 [1] that i still think about sometimes. Amongst other things, he talks about lifting himself to the next meta-level of composition, where he doesn't write music, he writes rules for a box which makes music: Q: If I could give you a black box that could do anything, what would you have it do? A: I would love to have a box onto which I could offload choice making. A thing that makes choices about its outputs, and says to itself, This is a good output, reinforce that, or replay it, or feed it back in. I would love to have this machine stand for me. I could program this box to be my particular taste and interest in things. Q: Why do you want to do that? You have you. A: Yes, I have me. But I want to be able to sell systems for making my music as well as selling pieces of music. In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of "their" works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box. Or you could buy a Brian Eno box. So then I would need to put in this box a device that represents my taste for choosing pieces. [1] https://www.wired.com/1995/05/eno-2/ https://www.wired.com/1995/05/eno-2/
- pcf 8y ago
  This should be doable? You could feed your entire catalogue into the machine, and have it start generating music. For every pass, you could listen to the created piece and tell it "I would not make anything like element X, because of [specific reason], so take that out." Enough of these passes and detailed removal of elements you wouldn't create, and you should get closer and closer to a machine that would be your musical clone.
  - jimmcslim 8y ago
    How well would it cope with the evolution of an artist's ouevre; would it recognise that certain sounds are from a certain period?
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    You need a machine description of "element" - which turns out to be a lot harder than it sounds.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - AgentME 8y ago
    This is missing the complexity to a lot of music. Swap "music" in your post for "books" or "software" or "human interactions" and maybe the skipped complexity becomes obvious. What if the key ingredient to someone's music is a long over-arching structure throughout the song of highs and lows following the emotional progression of a predictable 3-act story? The software would need to be capable of recognizing and synthesizing and tuning that kind of high-level element and surely many others like that. Even songs that are made up of a few repeating tracks overlaid probably have high-level qualities like that the artist tweaks the setup until the end results meet the high-level goal they were aiming for. I'm sure a musician who was also a programmer who understood their own tastes and creation process well enough could currently create something like this for a specific genre, but I think we're very far from a one-size-fits-all generator.
- 8y ago
kbenson 8y ago
> What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable — they are not likely to come back into sync again. I remember a few years back there was some quick guide to visual design that I saw that recommended this. To provide what appeared to be randomness over repeating samples (or at least prevent easy pattern matching in the brain which is distracting), take three images that can of different prime number lengths, then repeat each one and put them next to each other. I believe the example used was the ruffles in a stage curtain, where there were a few layers. Each layer was a repeating image of length 3, then length 5, then length 7 (but the image itself had some variations between ruffles within it). You won't get a point where all the images all stop and start at the same point (a dead giveaway of the pattern) until length 105.
- emzo 8y ago
  Here's the article you're referring to - https://www.sitepoint.com/the-cicada-principle-and-why-it-matters-to-web-designers/ https://www.sitepoint.com/the-cicada-principle-and-why-it-ma...
  - kbenson 8y ago
    I actually figured there was a good chance someone here would reply with it, since I believe I originally found it here either from a submission or a comment. Thanks!
- xinsight 8y ago
  I remember that article too! I used the same technique to make a convincing, non-duplicating flame-flicker algorithm for an led. 3 variables, all looping to different prime numbers and the sum of the 3 variables was the led intensity.

twic 8y ago

There was an interview with Eno in Wired in 1995 [1] that i still think about sometimes. Amongst other things, he talks about lifting himself to the next meta-level of composition, where he doesn't write music, he writes rules for a box which makes music: Q: If I could give you a black box that could do anything, what would you have it do? A: I would love to have a box onto which I could offload choice making. A thing that makes choices about its outputs, and says to itself, This is a good output, reinforce that, or replay it, or feed it back in. I would love to have this machine stand for me. I could program this box to be my particular taste and interest in things. Q: Why do you want to do that? You have you. A: Yes, I have me. But I want to be able to sell systems for making my music as well as selling pieces of music. In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of "their" works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box. Or you could buy a Brian Eno box. So then I would need to put in this box a device that represents my taste for choosing pieces. [1] https://www.wired.com/1995/05/eno-2/ https://www.wired.com/1995/05/eno-2/

pcf 8y ago
This should be doable? You could feed your entire catalogue into the machine, and have it start generating music. For every pass, you could listen to the created piece and tell it "I would not make anything like element X, because of [specific reason], so take that out." Enough of these passes and detailed removal of elements you wouldn't create, and you should get closer and closer to a machine that would be your musical clone.
- jimmcslim 8y ago
  How well would it cope with the evolution of an artist's ouevre; would it recognise that certain sounds are from a certain period?
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  You need a machine description of "element" - which turns out to be a lot harder than it sounds.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- AgentME 8y ago
  This is missing the complexity to a lot of music. Swap "music" in your post for "books" or "software" or "human interactions" and maybe the skipped complexity becomes obvious. What if the key ingredient to someone's music is a long over-arching structure throughout the song of highs and lows following the emotional progression of a predictable 3-act story? The software would need to be capable of recognizing and synthesizing and tuning that kind of high-level element and surely many others like that. Even songs that are made up of a few repeating tracks overlaid probably have high-level qualities like that the artist tweaks the setup until the end results meet the high-level goal they were aiming for. I'm sure a musician who was also a programmer who understood their own tastes and creation process well enough could currently create something like this for a specific genre, but I think we're very far from a one-size-fits-all generator.
8y ago

kbenson 8y ago

> What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable — they are not likely to come back into sync again. I remember a few years back there was some quick guide to visual design that I saw that recommended this. To provide what appeared to be randomness over repeating samples (or at least prevent easy pattern matching in the brain which is distracting), take three images that can of different prime number lengths, then repeat each one and put them next to each other. I believe the example used was the ruffles in a stage curtain, where there were a few layers. Each layer was a repeating image of length 3, then length 5, then length 7 (but the image itself had some variations between ruffles within it). You won't get a point where all the images all stop and start at the same point (a dead giveaway of the pattern) until length 105.

emzo 8y ago
Here's the article you're referring to - https://www.sitepoint.com/the-cicada-principle-and-why-it-matters-to-web-designers/ https://www.sitepoint.com/the-cicada-principle-and-why-it-ma...
- kbenson 8y ago
  I actually figured there was a good chance someone here would reply with it, since I believe I originally found it here either from a submission or a comment. Thanks!
xinsight 8y ago
I remember that article too! I used the same technique to make a convincing, non-duplicating flame-flicker algorithm for an led. 3 variables, all looping to different prime numbers and the sum of the 3 variables was the led intensity.