Slashdot Mirror
Statistically Optimal Music
ShinyPlasticBag writes "'Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live. What you hear on Eigenradio is the best of the New Music, distilled and de-correlated. One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio.' Listen up here or here (SHOUTcast)."
I quickly checked out the site and hit the #1 "Listen" link. At first, it was an interesting mix... in fact, it sounded very much like tuning an AM radio between stations, except that the overlapping songs were in clearly-defined hi-fi.
It was jarring at first, but then I got into a groove. They're right, the beat and the ambient voices have a strange but familiar variance.
Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to keep up the experience. After about a minute, the rhythms stopped, replaced by a metallic, toneless hum.
Cool... I've seen the Slashdot effect before, but now I'm getting to hear it!
Footnote: the rhythm has returned, but there's a lot more buzz than before. Will be interesting to hear what happens when the non-subscriber flood hits.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
What does the RIAA have to say about you using their copyrighted material to generate music - music which is arguably not unique, but rather derivatives of their property?
Somehow I don't think posting a link to a shoutcast-stream on slashdot is the smartest thing to do...
I've been listening to the stream for 5 minutes or so now. I can't help thinking that this is what a band of R2D2's would sound like, with C3P0 in random memory access as lead vocalist.
It's so very electronic and unnatural sounding, like nothing of this world.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Not quite something you can dance to, is it? I'd be interested in hearing the original music that's "just like" the Eigenradio (though I think I might prefer the Eigenradio).
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
1. Horizontal scrolling required
2. Tiny
3. Virtually no links to anything
4. Very small amount of information
John.
For the love of god, we will give your our women and our money, but make it stop!
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
Now, if there was anything worth listening to on the radio, I'd say they'd have something, but hey don't because "Garbage In = Garbage Out".
While hacking up pig snouts and horse hooves might make for an interesting, ummmm... "sausage", it's still nasty dead stuff...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Somehow I don't think posting a link to a shoutcast-stream on slashdot is the smartest thing to do...
Don't worry, it doesn't have long to live
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
IMHO this is yet another example of how academic projects are judged by the amount of attention they attract, rather than on whether they advance the state of the art. This is the reason why people like Kevin Warrick can stick a dog tag in their arm and go around claiming they are the world's first cyborg - all while being lavished with attention by the mainstream media.
All of this leads to an academic system that increasingly rewards self pubicity at the expense of real reasearch.
Oh, BTW - I listened to the radio station, it sounds like a garbled mess - I certainly couldn't determine the point of this from listening to it, but then I could say the same thing about rap.
When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it.
But what will the RIAA do when there are no more artists ?
Let me just go on record as saying that that's the weirdest web page layout I've encountered in a long time.
I wonder if you can do the same thing with video... hm.
--- If I had a funny sig too, you might be laughing now.
One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio.
i'm trying to tune in but i'm not hearing anything...i'd say that makes it better than old radio...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Get off those links. Some of us actually listen to this on a regular basis (or rather, all day at work) and it helps us be more productive. Give me back my noise please. I can't get anything done without it...
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
Funny you should use the word "derivative." That's exactly the word I'd use to describe 90% of the stuff on radio (especially that ClearChannel (tm) garbage).
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Its another MIT project on slashdot.
That makes approximately 25 thousand this week.
Time for an icon?
D'oh! And it sounded so cool, too!
Reader's Digest comes to music.
Beat and pitch.
Make the derivative "music" at least try to keep these consistant, or at least slowly varying. If you can do that, this might work well.
Interesting that a bank of computers replicating human music can be so much more interesting than humans trying to replicate human music. I guess they have have a long way to go before they can make music as boring as most major record labels. "It's a feature, not a bug."
Maybe partying will help...
And then... hit a college station playing this noise!
What a refreshment! What a way to cleanse the pallette. No chords. No lyrics. No beats. No guitars. Nothing recognizable at all! Just wonderful organized noise.
Then after listening to a LOT of it, especially the stuff that you know was actually composed by a human, something new happens:
You start to listen to the world around you (traffic, nature, conversations) as if it was composed. Imagining a single intention behind the noise of the world. It really is a beautiful mindset. See the restaurant scene in the movie "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould." http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0108328/
If you haven't spent a lot of time with music like this, try it. If you hate it after 5 minutes, listen for 10. If you hate it after 10, listen for 20. Try to appreciate it.
--
Derek Sivers, CD Baby
http://www.cdbaby.com
What a surprise, it's Slashdotted...
I don't know what radio stations they are sampling, but after a few minutes of listening it sounded like a bunch of "pop-tart" music strewn together being blasted over AM radio...
I used to always joke that you could take all of the Spear Britney albums and--if mixed properly--you could make one long song that didn't change themes, tones or melody once...I'm thinking this is one step closer to proving that theory.... Maybe it was just the time I tuned in--who knows?
There is one thing I find curious though, when I pick from 20 stations in my area, they are all playing the same 9 songs... I hope they have a better selection to choose from than I do!
"God is dead!" - Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is dead!" - God
So how long would this thing need to listen to NPR before it can start spitting out nice, liberal-minded stories with the sweet ring of Nina Totenberg's voice?
As far as information thoery goes, there can't be too much more real information in your average NPR bit than in a few minutes of dance music.
Please help me. I am stupid. How do I listen to to these .m3u thingies in Linux?
Kinda reminds me of that "Super Recipe" generator I engineered in my lair beneath the Pacific Ocean a few weeks ago. It makes super recipes based on good recipes that you input into it. I like ice cream and filet mignon, so the generator created a filet cream recipe that was supposed to be super but was terrible.
Blast!
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Wow, this really cleared up how this works for me! Thanks for such a clear, informative diagram!
100101011 010110101 000101010 1110010101
100010101 010001010 101011010 1001010001
001010101 101010001 010110001 0101010010....
What an interesting comment, I had to think about that one for a second. Generally Indo-European text reads across rather than up and down, so if a paragraph is horizontally larger than your window you have to pan twice to read each line, which is very annoying. However if a paragraph extends vertically a single scroll is sufficient for each page of text.
Seems to me marketing has been trying for years to create "optimal music" by homogenizing the sounds of every genre of music out there. Take the "packaged anger" bands, for example.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the server whimper as it slowly melts under a slashdotting.
Your grammar for the "YOU FAIL IT" post is not statistically optimal.
If that is all it takes for you to call a site 'bad' or even 'worst site ever' you haven't seen websites man.
I've seen websites so bad they violate the SALT 2 treaty against tactical nuclear weapons.
This one is an original Micheangelo compared to those.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live."
:)
And now officially "always Slashdotted"...
We should make sure they add that to the end of that scentence
- Voxel
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
That was the sound of the slashdotting of a shoutcast stream.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Those of you enjoying these ideas might want to check out John Cage's wonderful video, I have nothing to say and I am saying it.
:-) In many ways he has incorporated Eastern thinking into Western arts.
John Cage was a revolutionary philosopher-artist-composer with some good ideas on how to be happy
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Sounds like a garage band tuning their instruments while their was some strange feedback being picked up in the background. It's horrid, it should filter out high pitched buzz noises and other things like that. And it should make some system of rythem, it's like random chunks of crap mixed into one big random chunk of crap.
"Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live."
This should be now officially changed to:
"Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on, always live and always Slashdotted!"...
- Voxel
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
I wonder why they chose to name it "Eigenradio"? Eigen being a German word, it seems that the primary meaning is "to own." Really makes me wonder what kind of statement they are trying to make. Of course it seems obvious to me that the main point of this project (outside of the technical challenge presented) is to make some sort of statement regarding the music industry.
Do not read this sig.
But how many songs is it worth on a 56x burner?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
anyone look at the page source?
I bet this is how they Really make the music ...
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
"The requested server is full."
You'll have that sometimes...
This idea has sparked my interest, but the streams are most definately Slashdotted. Would it be possible for someone who has the stream to use Peercast to help take some of the burden off the server?
... that this site is a wonderfully clever troll? Once you get past the notion that anyone could possibly be serious about Eigenmusic, satire is all that makes sense. A tip of the hat to the creators!
The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. -- William Gibson
It would be interesting to hear the differences in "statistically optimal" music produced as a result of correlating different genres of music.
E.g., would people who only listened to Rock be more inclined to like the output of this program if its input was limited to Rock music? Could it create an "optimal" song?
The Problem: A few years ago a station from Stockton, California, known as "Your Christian Companion" (KYCC) set up a translator in the eastern suburbs of Sacramento. They licensed a translator on 90.1FM (translator number K211DF), and since then, the once listenable signal of KDVS has been knocked off the spectrum there. Since then, KCJH/KYCC, the station that preaches God's word, has been expanding, setting up stations to cause interference with other stations like non-profit student stations similar to KDVS. In the East Bay area near Livermore, you can hear KYCC on 2 to 4 different frequencies, covering up many Bay Area college radio stations. The station is a fundraising tool for itself, collecting money to go toward buying new translators to feed their programming via automated procedure via satellite. This conservative entity is using non-commercial educational frequencies as a loophole to rebroadcast satellite programming in effort to gain more money for their own causes. Because of this, listeners in some parts of Sacramento cannot tune into KDVS. You can help try to get the FCC to move their translator from 90.1 FM to another frequency by making your voice heard to the FCC. Here's how you can help. Write an email stating you listen to KDVS radio, the only college/student run station in the area. State that KDVS 90.3FM is a Sacramento area station at 9200 watts, but it cannot be heard in some parts of Sacramento because 90.1 FM interferes with it. The station used to be heard in all of Sacramento, but since 90.1 FM came on the air, it causes so much interference that it essentially blocks the signal in some areas. (You may add other comments).
Give Your First and Last Name
Your Address
Email Address
Email your statement to todd@kdvs.org. with "INTERFERECE COMPLAINT" in the subject heading It will then be compiled with other letters and sent to the FCC jointly.
You may also reach the FCC at their web site: www.fcc.gov. and make comments there
KYCC's growing station list
90.1 Stockton
89.1 Livington
89.7 Antioch/Pittburg
90.5 Livermore
91.1 Chico
90.3 Dublin
93.5 Vacaville
87.7 Benicia
90.1 Sacramento
99.5 Elk Grove
91.3 Provo Utah
89.9 Alamogordo, NM
89.1 El Paso, Texas
88.3 Reno, NV
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Well, neither does this.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
For others unable to listen to eigenradio because of the slashdot effect. I recommend groove salad until things calm down:
www.somafm.com
128k
56k
24k
The DJ, Rusty Hodge, had an interview with slashdot a while back.
enjoy
-metric
I think from the dead webserver they are now playing a very literal version of Simon and Garfunkel's The Sounds of Silence - because I can't hear a damn thing!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
It also means "proper." Hence its use in linear algebra (eigenvalue, eigenvector, eigenspace...) So eigenradio is "proper radio."
I find this drive for computer generated artificial music unnecessary. Why bother, when we have airwaves full of _equally_ uninspired, artifical music such as Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera.
Besides, it seems like this process of Musical distillation, of which the story speaks, has brought us these "talents" in the first place!
M3U is a text file containing a newline-delimited list of resource identifiers from which to stream audio or video. They can be URIs or local paths. XMMS, Winamp, and many other popular media players can handle M3U files; some save their playlists in this format.
Will I retire or break 10K?
just because 20 radio stations play this music doesn't mean I like it. actually, there is only one radio station(fm, not internet) that I listen to.
Noise.
There is actually SOME music in it, but there is also a lot of blatant chaos...
It's fun to listen to, though.
If you haven't spent a lot of time with music like this, try it. If you hate it after 5 minutes, listen for 10. If you hate it after 10, listen for 20. Try to appreciate it.
Uh, why? I checked eigenradio out a week or two back and, in addition to being boring as hell, it was physically painful to listen to. But I made myself stick with it for a bit, in an attempt to see what was so wonderful about it. I failed miserably.
So, would you care to go beyond your admonition to "try to appreciate it" and tell us just what you think is there to appreciate? Is it just your "beautiful mindset" of believing the world to be overarchingly ordered or is there some other reason you're telling us to continue listening to something we hate?
When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Too late Eigenradio. The music industry has been doing this for years.
Got Shadowrun? Awakened Worlds
I think there should be a story about spamarrest? I can't get my god damned mail! Did they go under?
I'm going to have to stick with The Ataris on this one:
Every now and then
I turn it on again
But it's plain to see
That the radio still sucks
"We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal."
- Simon & Garfunkel + James Taylor + Bob Dylan
- Marylin Manson + Tool + Nirvana
- A bunch of Christmas carols + Dead Kennedys
- TV theme songs + Gregorian chant
- Eigenradion + itself
Guys, give us a copy of the software to feed stuff into!"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Winamp isn't a web site at all. But if you don't like the UI, there's about a billion skins available.
I think you just defined ambient music.
John Cage
Step 1: Invent retarted station based on an alphabet's soup of statistical techniques that have no relevance to anything
Step 2: Publish this crap wherever will accept the junk
Step 3: Pay Taco for a link on slashdot
Step 4: Put out press release of your shitty project
Step 5: Hope this helps your tenure outlook
Step 6: Cut workload down to 10 hours/week. This is pretty close to profit.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I highly doubt that you can derive optimal music from music that is played on the radio...
After listening to the station I must say this sounds like an alien transmission. We must notify SETI at once and prepare to welcome our new alien overlords.
'makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live.'
That's all well and good, but what if more than half of those stations happen to be playing music that sucks? (even good stations use filler too..)
Incidentally, why didn't your chief engineer fight their application for a translator?
-T
The diagrams aren't intended to say anything, they're eye-noise just like the music is ear-noise. You're critiquing the ketchup stains on the table.
If you need anymore clues we're here for ya, buddy.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
I've managed to get a mirror up; http://64.5.58.149:81/ in your music player of choice should work, as long as I don't lose my connection to the main stream...
Enjoy!
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
If you download the .m3u and rename it to text, you'll usually see an HTTP URI pointing to a .mp3 file. Wget that URI and then click stop after you've downloaded enough. Rumor has it that those few .ram files that include an HTTP stream (in addition to the proprietary PNM and Real's embraced-and-extended version of RTSP) can be downloaded in much the same way.
Will I retire or break 10K?
i've actually sampled some of this before to use in my own electronic music. it feels very good to put the incoherently blended sounds of a bunch of annoying top 40 songs into a different (less obnoxious) context and call it my own. it's a constructive form of revenge for the pain they inflict on me via radios everywhere :)
If you're listening to ClearChannel stations, then isn't it statistically mediocre music?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Statistically, I'd say there's about a 100% probability that the site is slashdotted...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
It could be even cooler if they would write a name blender program to blend most popular station names together and then name their station after that result.
What makes you think that the slashdot effect changes the content of the music?
Actually, I think what he was trying to say was something along the lines of:
In Soviet Russia, music slashdots you.
100? 500? 2500? Not enough for a gang of slashdot geeks anyway. I wish I could listen to it in a week.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Come on you guys, look more closely...
"All those stations, playing all that music, all the time! There's at least 40 different songs being played every week on most radio stations!"
Yes, there are well over 40 songs out there. I think this is more of a prank than some sort of serious scientific thingie.
Theyre contacting Darl to get pointers..
zeke
Blackalicious and KRS One.
Also, the older Busta Rhymes (before he got to full of himself)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
maybe you should ask autopr0n first.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Now, think of the aural equivalent. Oh, real great.
it doesn't really extract "musical themes" per se. It is a purely statistical engine, using simple filterbanks (FFT) to partition and quantify the sound. It then picks the "most statistically important" pieces back together in a semi-intelligent manner.
This is sort of like taking a bunch of photos, taking all the common/important parts out, and stitching them into a new photo. I guarantee you it would look sort of like a person (cobbled together from different people) standing in front of a mixmash of backgrounds. Unless you like non-human subjects, in which case it looks like a cat.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Sure, it looks like it might be insightful, but if you actually COMPREHENDED what he was saying, it was +1 Funny.
m2 M-TWOOO!!!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I'm slightly scared. This is a technological curiosity of its own might, granted, but this prompts me to envision a rather gloom future. Originally I've thought that the rise of networking would eliminate the entire corporate structure involved in music-making and be replaced with system where everyone can give a go at composing, publish their work online and where the best artists could probably managed to make quite a fortune with voluntary donations.
However, could record companies do the ultimate thing, a la Nineteen Eighty-Four, and create a computer program that produces the music most of us want to hear? Would that mean the end of human creativity on that level of play, or would this algorithm be doomed to failure? It might only take a few years to adjust, and you'd end up liking it.
Of course, a prudent question is, if music can be replicated so easily, what's the point in appreaciating it any longer, as it's clearly something even machines can do well...
Next up: television series writing machines. But, oh wait, we already have reality tv...
just pick some "feature", maybe filterbanked sets of coefficients from the time series, and call that a vector. Collect them over the sources, and evolve a set of eigenvectors that pick out the prinicple components of that space. Use relative eigenvalues from each source to pick a "dominant" represent set for the output.
Transform back, and what do you have... weird shit!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
figures. Anyone want to guess that the vectors of the state space are coefficients of a very common filterbank over the radio's time series, and there are as many as there are input stations?
Yeagh for MATLAB!!!!!!!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
in Wayside School is falling down.
How was she?
Delicious!
So can I join the GNAA now?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Statistical analysis is just not the way to write music, except perhaps for tone deaf nerds, and record execs. You have every right to play whatever form of music you choose. I have every right to listen to something else! If it got groove I do not care. I have never heard any computer generated music that can even come close to a great composer or musician, the differences are obvious. What appeals to the audiance is never the way to write music. It is how to please record companies, but is artless garbage that is as quickly forgotten as fast as it is created.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm listening to it right now and it sounds like I'm between stations on an AM radio. I used to be intrigued by trying to tune into AM radio stations at night to see if I could hear one that was hundreds of miles away, but now I listen to Autechre to get the same effect. There's no discernible melody, but there is 'musical' structure.
This radio station gets me to thinking: since Clear Channel runs the music selection on most radio stations, and by playing the most popular frequencies of 40+ stations you end up with no discernible melody but 'musical' structure, could this be the only way Autechre makes it to the radio?
Too bad the /. effect is not permanent.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I was listening for quite some time, maybe 10 mins or more, and all of a sudden that song came on, and took over for a good 2 mins! What maddness
We'll give you our women ...
/.) ... nevermind
... why do I even try anymore ... (mopes away)
(looks around and realizes this is
But we will give you our money!!!
(looks around and sees gooey reminants of IT bubble)
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
he's clearly trying to make you suffer.
http://home.cvc.org/acc/ugly/jw.jpg
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
A common way to do this is to replay the last buffer. If the outage is long this tends to generate a metallic buzz if the buffer is short and a "Max Headroom"-style stutter if the buffer is long.
I dont know what player *YOU* use, but I've never had a player that replays the last buffer. All I've ever used just completely stops, waiting for the data to come in... Of course, I'm not uber l33t lunix hax0r that you sound to be.
^_^
Joseph?
Three main questions:
1) Whua!?
2) Sucks or Rocks?
3) Copyright ramifications? I'm sure the RIAA will blow a gasket if these MIT people get this thing to work.
Brought to you by Network 23!
*BOOM*
Anyone who takes an intermediate signal processing class learns about Princ. Component Analysis (PCA). Loosely, it attempts to represent a set of signals as weighted, linear combinations of sub-signals..... The technique allows you to find the pieces of signal that are common to the overall set. In this case I'm sure they are lining up some radio feeds, performing PCA, doing a little trivial stuff to it, and synthesizing their own "music" based on some transformation of the PCA weights and computed vectors. Not a big deal -- more like a one afternoon project for a grad student, or maybe a class project for a few undergrads...
Usually you use an pick_region->apply_weighted_window->transform->man ipulate->untransform->overlap->add->move_half_wind ow_width
procedure. This prevents discontinuity across block boundaries, and prevents aliasing (high frequencies -> low frequencies and vice versa during transform).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Aphex Twin's music has done this for me. At first it just sounds like crappy noise randomly generated, but then you just "get it"...
Aphex Twin's music spans all forms of electronic music, Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 is an incredibly WONDERFUL bedtime album, while Drukqs is a great album while working... There's something about the almost chaotic aspect of it that keeps my mind focused.
It's tough to go back to listening to mainstream radio after experiencing music that changes a person's perspective.
To anyone who ignores/avoids ambient music, or music like most of the Aphex Twin library, I give the same advice, just keep listening, and wait... Eventually, it'll just click, and you win.
here are two sample mp3's from when i could access the servers. i'll keep the torrents up for a couple of hours or until the server dies...
.zip of two .torrent files
Whooahhh! Can I ask what you're smoking?
Computers writing music will never happen. At some level, it will always be people using computers as tools to write music. But we have that already (ie Mixing of music).
:-)) What classifies this as a music composition? It makes a number of algorithmic choices to create a new sound.
First off, this is a single aleotoric (sp?) composition that is extremely similar to John Cage's 'radio symphony' produced a while ago (I don't remember the date or the exact title, but I'm sure someone will correct (or flame) me about it
Even with the lack of posted details about the algorithm, there are a number of assumptions in the algorithm that explain some of the impressions reported on Slashdot.
"Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies..." - right off the bat, we're assuming that frequencies are important to how we listen to music. Research in psychoacoustics suggests that this isn't the case - we stream music into 'parts' organized by the start and stop points of frequency bands. These streams are then processed for whether the pitch/timbre/rhythm patterns are recognized or not. This is partially demonstrated by the way we talk of 'voices' or 'instruments' having pitch and color (timbre) and of particular songs having 'a good groove'. Any diagram describing this kind of process would have feedback accross the whole diagram, so I doubt its a part of the algorithm used.
"...only the beats with the highest entropy..." Repetition is a feature of all music everywhere - the only musical universal known. Similarly, the 'ideal' degree of entropy in music (how much it repeats) tends to be suprisingly high - music with the highest entropy is actually 'bad'. This differs from culture to culture, but low entropy in good music is the norm, not the exception. Music that has 'high entropy' as a feature already have two strikes against it.
"If you took a bunch of music and asked it, 'Music, what are you, really?' you'd hear Eigenradio singing back at you." This assumes that all music is uniform and can be summaraized into a single source. Contrary to this assumption, there are significant differences between genre types - they exploit different mechanisms for producing pleasure in their listeners. This doesn't even begin to touch non-Western music (even non western pop music). Some of these mechanisms are mutually exclusive (polyphonic music versus homophonic music). An 'average' or 'distilled' reproduction ends up activating no psychological hooks very well and ends up sounding boring.
"They know what you really want to hear. " This assumes that the creator can know what "music" is for you. Each culture hears music differently - with different qualifications for what makes music 'good'. Brain scans of trained classical musicians and their untrained counterparts conducted both in Japan and in the US demonstrated differences in the way these sounds were processed among the four groups. The differences between trained and untrained listeners was radical. Not only do tastes differ, but the music you hear is not the same music I hear - even if the same sound is presented. No single piece of music can legitimately make this claim.
The number you have dialed is imaginary, please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
... llew sa sdrawkcab sgat LMTH eseht etirw dluoc ylno fi, woN
More than mere navel gazing.
The PCA-box in the image is for probably Principal Component Analysis. This is statistical method using, among other things, eigenvalues.
What could the other boxes be?
"When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it."
I heard all this SHIT on the radio today, so it must be good.
I mean, four billion flies like shit, so who am I to argue?
668: Neighbour of the Beast
When we're in a restaurant, and they're playing the music too loud, and the waitress is taking forever to get there, I don't get mad.
I just start hand dancing. That is, I choreograph my hands, maybe my head/eye motions, to the music, with only the most subtle motions. That drives my wife crazy, but amuses me. Actually, it amuses her too; she starts laughing, and then says "stop it." But it passes the time.
But it gave me an idea for a music video, in which they play the music, and the band is there, playing, and the people are there, frozen in time, just standing around, but then as you look more closely, you see that they actually are dancing in a rather complicated, interesting dance.
Then, at the end, you finish up with something like a bit of sheet music falling down, or a lady's ring dropping, or maybe with everybody stopping, and stretching, talking, and going out afterwards.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I remember the days when MIT hackers would do interesting things and explain them well.
The best translation I can give is "to get with it," although it also means apurar (hurry up), and sometimes "wake up" also. "Espabilado" means "on the ball," "street smart," and "brilliant" (like a source of light). Si usted quiere saber por que la palavra parece muy rara, es porque no se usa mucho en mexico o espana--pero es comun en otras partes del mundo latino, especialmente centroamerica.
But I think what you want to know is where that confounded quote came from. It's from a song by Mano Negra (fronted by Manu Chao), called "La Vida"(sorry about the backdround image). They have songs in Spanish, English, French, and Farsi. Manu Chao has a couple songs in Portuguese, too.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
2. Tiny
3. Virtually no links to anything
4. Very small amount of information
5. Profit!
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
All the great ones has done something new. Maybe not something completely new (all the notes has been hit before;)), but never the less not what the rest was doing. We have the king, beatles, and then all the waves, such as rap, punk, grunge, NWBHM (let's see if anyone knows that one), etc.
This reminds me of what happened when Beatles hit it big and all of a sudden if you showed up with two guitars the labels hired you...
But then again, not much of the new music comming out is worth listening to, horrible mixes (my ears tire, and I don't have good music ears), bland, homogenus. I don't want to be bored nor shocked, I want to be entertained.
the 'music' actually sounds pretty shitty. I agree it's an exciting project - it's just funny that the end result of MIT brilliance is a song not on par with Vanilla Ice...
...Cmdr. Data is to stand-up comedy. ("Take my Worf, please.") Technically, this is not an original concept, as Data basically was doing almost exactly this in one scene in an episode. He had like 7 different pieces of music playing cranked at the same time that he was listening to/analysing when LeForge entered the scene and screamed at him to make it stop (or at least just play one... or something like that). 1) I agree with LeForge on this. Make it stop. 2) Does this mean Universal has a copyright for Eigenradio already?
I dunno, but most of Aphex's stuff doesn't sound that strange. Autechre's latest albums, on the other hand, do - especially since most phrases were algorithmically generated and then hand-selected by Sean and Rob.
Or take almost anything made by Fennesz. Or T.Raumschmiere.
(Disclaimer: I own almost anything by Aphex Twin [except for the really obscure and hard-to-get stuff, but only rarely listen to any of it anymore... and lately, I much prefer to play dubby, ambient stuff like Basic Channel, Gas, Pole, Deadbeat while I'm doing something...)
np: Thomas Fehlmenn - Decke (Visions Of Blah)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
It is indeed like listening to 20 radio stations - all through the same set of speakers :o(
Inflamatory - Yes!
Funny - Hopefully!
Totally.
After really trying to like Autechre's Confield album and failing, I started noticing really interesting things.
For example, once when I was driving around in a loaner Hyundai on a gravel road. The car had only minimal noise insulation and the pinging, metallic bursts of the fine gravel hitting the wheel arches was sort of like waves, but I could listen to it as a whole sound or many small sounds. Or try both at the same time. In stereo, of course.
Then I noticed the bass of the wind - at the limits of my hearing. The lowest of the low, gigantic, sounding with the most effortless immense force and unfocused. Really rather scary.
Then the engine, which I decided would be the melody in this case. It took a little coercing of my brain, but it worked out. It's not that much different than some weird far-away-indigenous music i've heard.
And it was nice. The real world is pretty god damn hi-fi, too.
Note: I drive sober.
Jag pratar lite svenska.
Humans can make music using computers.
Computers can't make music using computers.
Or even radio stations.
The very idea is disgusting. Has people forgot how
good real and sincere music, played live by people
playing it for the love of it sounds like?
This only reminds how disgutingly consumer-based
our society is.
Does anyone else find that sort of metallic noise familiar? It sounds uncannily like the effect of an audio processor called a ring modulator - also known as a multiplier. What's the betting they're just multiplying together all the inputs?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
One is non-originality. When part of a song is not original to the artist, the copyright on the song does not cover the non-original part. Of course, someone else might have a copyright on it.
Another is de minimus use. Some samples, if they are very short, are simply too short for the law to pay attention - "the law does not concern itself with trifles" is the usual quote. But in music, this might be a very short time-length sample, probably less than a second. Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it.
This quote from their site seems to indicate that they synthesize their broadcast based on an analysis of various other broadcasts. But, now that I am listiening to the station, it seems to be made at least partly of sampling (at least the voices).
If the music is originally synthesized, even if based on an analysis of actual music, I don't see how this would be an infringement - I mean, surely one could analyze multiple paintings from various artists and then compose a composition based on the results (most common hues, subjects, etc.).
But if any parts are reused, even if transformed, I am pretty sure infringement could be found. The courts would likely apply the usual "substantial similarity" tests.
- Haddock 0011 Pea Gallows
- Beer Cube
lol
The titles are even more weird than the music. I wonder what they're based on. OK, now I need to listen to "Insurance Century". See ya!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Sounds like he hate some magic mushrooms to me.
Yeah, this one time I was taking this magic carpet ride, and all of the pixies started signing for me, fun stuff.
Not that I'm saying you would like ambient music composed by a human any more than you liked Eigenradio. But it is different.
FWIW, I didn't like ambient music (or avant garde music, depending on who you ask) the first time I heard it. I bought a few CDs, hated it, and put it down for a few months. But then I started to listen to other groups that include elements of ambient music. Bands like Gastr Del Sol, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Sigur Ros (hell, even Radiohead and Wilco to some degree) have all pushed the boundaries of what has been considered music. They all employ unique sounds and noises to create something different than what your used to listening to. And they are all far more accessible than purely ambient music.
These bands also brought to a point where I could "get" ambient music. Now I can listen to a Jim O'Rourke or Fenno'berg album and actually enjoy it.
Not that I'm recommending everyone should try this. I like it, but that doesn't make it better than your music.
Taft
I beg to differ, I love those ISR jokes :)
In Soviet Russia, ISR jokes love YOU!
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
http://www.gotSheep.com :)
Yup, I collect them. And the reside quite happily out in the front yard
...but does it work in Linux?!
Just what I need, a program listening to Clearwater channels and making more pop crap just like they play! No thanks, sticking to rock, preferably classic rock. I want music worth listening to, and that I am able to enjoy.
Sounds like Shirley & Spinoza without the skits.
MjM
Groovy. Gear. Mod.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Sounds like masturbating to erotic pictures of yourself.