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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.
I wonder if you can do the same thing with video... hm.
--- If I had a funny sig too, you might be laughing now.
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.
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.
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
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.
;-) )
Every Spring semester at Michigan State University's Computer Science department, the capstone class (taken by seniors to graduate) did a project and had a "poster competition" to see who did the best project.
The team that won the year I saw them was the team that wrote a program that graphed a song's FFT over time. That's it. They went on to babble about how you can recognize a song based on how it looks, visual recognition, and it did some ill-conceived 3D stuff that, by making the song data fit into even less space on the screen, was even more impossible to see. (I think you were supposed to eventually pick the song you wanted to hear by looking at this tiny, tiny representations.... at the risk of potentially offending one of the authors, who may conceivably read this, that's stupid! If they just seriously tried it once, they'd have seen how poorly this worked.) (See here for an example of a guy playing around with that kind of graph; note most songs look NOTHING like that in an FFT graph.
The fact is, it's a neat idea but it doesn't work. All songs in a particular pretty much look alike in an FFT graph. The differences are pretty minimal. Making it smaller doesn't help at all. The program looked really cool on a poster, using one song, but use it on six or seven real songs and ask even yourself to distinguish them and you can't; you don't "see" and "hear" that way.
IIRC a dot-com was founded based on this idea, AFAIK indepedently derived.
What does this have to do with your post? I thought about half of the other posters deserved the prize over this project, in that they were useful, interesting, or potentially even groundbreaking, in the small way that a semester project can be. But they didn't have a Beatles song graphed out on their poster. They lose.
Even college professors aren't immune to judging on surface appearences and glitz, rather then real value.
... 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
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.
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!
...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?
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.