4 ms·

WolframTones: An Experiment in a New Kind of Music

17 points by solipsist 16y ago

bentruyman 16y ago
Best MIDI generator I've ever used.
wickedchicken 16y ago
No doubt this is on the front page because of the previous generative music application posted not long ago on HN. I'll make the same comment here as I did there (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2455023 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2455023), namely WolframTones tries too hard to emulate human-generated music and ends up sounding awful instead. There is an interesting argument to be made that 'art' attempted to be understood from an analytic viewpoint ("what is the automaton that creates jazz?") loses its meaning while extracting art from mathematics ("I wonder what a random automaton sounds like?") tends to have very interesting results. It seems to be a one-way operation.
btipling 16y ago
Doesn't seem to work for me on Chrome on Mac OS X. I have flashblock but I disabled. According to the FAQ it uses quicktime. I think I might have that disabled.
- cleverjake 16y ago
  works fine for me. You need to enable quicktime to run on the site though. it does not by default now.
SwellJoe 16y ago
This is surprisingly awful, in nearly every dimension. The melodies are approximately random within a given scale, the harmonies are aimless, and the instruments are the cheesiest I've heard in over a decade. There have been numerous algorithmic and automatic and learning composers over the years that are better than this, at least from an aesthetic perspective, or at least on par. It's a hard problem, but I honestly expected something much more interesting from Wolfram. At the very least someone making something like this ought to make an effort to understand the current state of the art in the field.
- lurker14 16y ago
  > someone making something like this ought to make an effort to understand the current state of the art in the field. Are you surprised? That's precisely the same criticism Wolfram received when he first published ANKOS: http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html

17 points by solipsist 16y ago

Best MIDI generator I've ever used.

No doubt this is on the front page because of the previous generative music application posted not long ago on HN. I'll make the same comment here as I did there (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2455023 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2455023), namely WolframTones tries too hard to emulate human-generated music and ends up sounding awful instead. There is an interesting argument to be made that 'art' attempted to be understood from an analytic viewpoint ("what is the automaton that creates jazz?") loses its meaning while extracting art from mathematics ("I wonder what a random automaton sounds like?") tends to have very interesting results. It seems to be a one-way operation.

btipling 16y ago

Doesn't seem to work for me on Chrome on Mac OS X. I have flashblock but I disabled. According to the FAQ it uses quicktime. I think I might have that disabled.

cleverjake 16y ago
works fine for me. You need to enable quicktime to run on the site though. it does not by default now.

SwellJoe 16y ago

This is surprisingly awful, in nearly every dimension. The melodies are approximately random within a given scale, the harmonies are aimless, and the instruments are the cheesiest I've heard in over a decade. There have been numerous algorithmic and automatic and learning composers over the years that are better than this, at least from an aesthetic perspective, or at least on par. It's a hard problem, but I honestly expected something much more interesting from Wolfram. At the very least someone making something like this ought to make an effort to understand the current state of the art in the field.

lurker14 16y ago
> someone making something like this ought to make an effort to understand the current state of the art in the field. Are you surprised? That's precisely the same criticism Wolfram received when he first published ANKOS: http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html