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)
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)
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.
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.
Reader's Digest comes to music.
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
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....
If you listen carefully, you can hear the server whimper as it slowly melts under a slashdotting.
anyone look at the page source?
I bet this is how they Really make the music ...
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
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?
No, but it's great for epileptic spasms...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
... 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
> But what will the RIAA do when there are no more artists ?
That's what they're doing now.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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?
Eigen is a fairly well-established prefix in quantum mechanics (eigenvalues, eigenvectors, eigenstates etc.) An eigenstate is one of an infinite set of orthogonal solutions to a set of equations, an eigenvalue is a unique value (often energy) corresponding to a particular eigenstate. Thus I suspect in this case the term is supposed to mean something like "unique radio", which seems at least reasonably appropriate, if rather skewed. I suspect you're wrong about it being a comment on the state of the music industry, at least primarily. It seems like they're just using radio stations as a source of material 'cos it happens to be readily available. 'Course, the fact that it can't be much /worse/ than commercial radio is pretty ironic ;-)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I think you just defined ambient music.
John Cage
So the term eigenmusic could be used to describe the underlying defining characteristic of a music. You could say that all Britney Spears' music has the same eigenmusic.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.