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?
I wonder if you can do the same thing with video... hm.
--- If I had a funny sig too, you might be laughing now.
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.
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
Wow, this really cleared up how this works for me! Thanks for such a clear, informative diagram!
> For the love of god, we will give your our women and our money, but make it stop!
I notice you didn't offer your sheep.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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.
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.
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...