Swarm Theory Applied to Music

JoeCotellese writes "There is an article in Discover magazine about computer scientist/musician Tim Blackwell and his Swarm Music software. This software creates improvisational music based on models of swarming and flocking. The observation was made that interaction among musicians is interdependent and yet independent and this dynamic parallels flock dynamics. Computer generated music has been around for a while but according to his web site, this project was the first application of swarm theory to music. Sample MP3s are available on his website."

Comments

Re:MP3?

[jpsst34]

You have to look for the (mp3).wav file. (I don't get it, either.)

Similar Project

[mattlary]

Al Biles from RIT has been working with genetic algorithms to do jazz solos.
Here's a link to information on his genetic algorithm, GenJam.

-Matt

Re:Douglas Adams would be proud!

[Drakon]

He discusses this in some mathematical detail at times.

he specifically mentions the conversion of a flock of birds to sounds ... :-)

On a side note... that link should goto: http://www.iblist.com/book.php?id=252
here?

SUPPORT THE INTERNET BOOK LIST! SUBMIT A BOOK! :-)

Re:MP3?

[divbyzero]

I can explain the concept of MP3 in a WAV file.

MPEG Layer 3 Audio is fundamentally a compression algorithm, not a file format. While it is most often used with the particular set of headers and packaging that make up an "MP3" file, it does not have to be.

Microsoft WAV files can contain audio in any of several dozen different formats. The most common format is uncompressed "PCM" audio, but by setting the right flags in the header, various compression schemes can be used instead. One of the more recent compression algorithms to be supported in WAV files is MPEG Layer 3.

Tada!

UCSD's modern music department

[Goldsmith]

UCSD's music department offers an undergraduate computer music class. I took the class and we did some swarm based music. In fact, as a final project in the class, I wrote a program to produce music based on fusion plasma simulations in a tokamak (my job at the time), which contains similar algorythms.

These are not especially new ideas.

Re:No one has mentioned....

[oever]

Flight of the Bumblebee is a fine piece of music by Rimsky-Korsakov, especially in Christian Lindbergs version on trombone. Unfortunately for your karma, bumblebees do not fly in swarms.

Re:MP3?

[Yokaze]

A minor correction: Mpeg Audio 1 Layer 3 is a encoding scheme, not a compression algorithm. It may tightly coupled with the compression scheme, but it is not bound by it.
From the MPEG 1 Audio FAQ

It does not standardize the encoder, but rather standardizes the type of information that an encoder has to produce and write to an MPEG-1 conformant bitstream as well as the way in which the decoder has to parse, decompress, and resynthesize this information in order to regain the encoded sound.

That is, why the quality differed (differs?) greatly between various encoders (Fraunhofer, Xing, LAME, ...).

MPEG is stream based. The file is devided into frames, each having its own header. Those headers are necessary in order to discover a frame and to identify the type of the frame in the data-stream.