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)."
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?
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John.
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.
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 makes you think that the slashdot effect changes the content of the music?
I guess it would depend on how they've configured their systems. If they have one box processing the incoming signals, and another box uploading the result to their Windows Media Server, then we might overload the second box but the sound would be unchanged.
But if the box that does the processing is the same as the one that's attempting to service all the requests from Slashdotters, it seems like it would eat up CPU cycles. That would make it more difficult to do the real-time synthesis of 20 incoming signals. I suspect that's the cause of the toneless drone I was hearing.
Add to that the bandwidth -- do they have one pipe that's receiving 20 signals, outputting (however many) Eigenradio streams, *and* serving up the strangely-formatted web page?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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...
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...