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Cellular Automata and Music Using Java
Justin Powell writes "Take computers, mathematics, and the Java Sound API, add in some Java code, and you've got a recipe for creating some uniquely fascinating music. IBM Staff Software Engineer Paul Reiners demonstrates how to implement some basic concepts of algorithmic music composition in the Java language. He presents code examples and resulting MIDI files generated by the Automatous Monk program, which uses the open source jMusic framework to compose music based on mathematical structures called cellular automata."
Lets hope it sounds better than DNA music. That was tried a while ago and was horrible.
Josh
If you like that, try this: Fractmus 2000 (win32)
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
My personal preference for coding this kind of thing:
KeyKit, an awk-like language designed specifically for manipulating MIDI data.
http://nosuch.com/keykit/
Also, the short write-up we handed out during the exhibition can be found here.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
I don't know about the state of mods (and friends) these days, but at least earlier on midi had much better polyphony and finer time control compared to mods. And lots of music hardware speaks midi.
jmusic has nothing on the facilities offered by the programs mentioned in the parent. PD is an incredible environment for experimental music composition.
After following some links, here's some cool human-assisted mathematically-generated music:
;)
/.'d already =)
http://www.geocities.com/vienna/9349/
The first prime number and pi midi files are awesome
Might hafta wait til tomorrow tho - looks like the guy's geocities account got
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
IANAL, but here's how I understand it:
.. the output is copyright by the person whose efforts created the output .. the operator/musician/whatever.
The person who generated the music has the copyright (not the programmer or the program).
Unless a substantial part of the copyrighted program is included in the output. For an extreme example, imagine a simple program that "generates" music by playing one of two MP3s, and the MP3s were copyrighted by the programmer. The output includes a substantial part of the original program, so in fact the output is copyrighted by the original programmer.
On the other end, imagine a program that outputs random MIDI notes
I remember an interview with Autechre (they are a popular electronic music duo that often uses algorithms and programs like Max/MSP to create their music). They said they wish they could sell their programs instead of selling static albums, but they didn't want to because the copyright would belong to the person running the program, who could then just record it and sell the CDs.
Today it does... But think about when it first appeared... The .mod (.s3m, .xm, etc) format was a bridge between .mid and .wav formats... in MIDI, you have a pure music score, and you rely on the local hardware to decode the song and make it sound realistic. A Waveform is pure audio output, with no track structure to indicate which instrument is supposed to play when, it's just an amalgum of all the frequencies together. Back in 1987 only the Amiga had multivoice sound, and you didn't have all this fancy on-board sound banks. You were supposed to buy a dedicated card for MIDI, or external hardware. Later for IBM PCs, your joystick port was expected to serially connect to a MIDI device that could play the music... which is why it's also called a Roland MPU-401 port.
.mod formats were 4 voices (now 64), but Modules still fill a niche.
The Module format allows you to create a song in pseudo-sheet music form, while it also stores the audio samples for the tracks in the file itself... The song sounds just as good on an 8-bit audio card without a MIDI decoder, as it does on today's 32-bit cards with practically a symphony of samples in ROM. Yes, you were limited to music beats in 1/64th of a measure, and Yes, early
Ah, information. We can see from this history that the SoundBlaster had their own form of synthesized music in 1989 (OPL2), and didn't support General MIDI until SoundBlaster 16 in 1992.
I'm puzzled why the poster referred to the title of the guy as "Staff Software Engineer" as if it's something special at IBM. Not to denigrate the work he's done, but 'staff engineer' is not worth mentioning. In context as seen from an IBM Engineers perspective (I'm also staff, fwiw) it's pretty funny that you would even include it. Here's the ranks for those that might care:
Band 1-5: The non-technical types.
Band 6: "nothing" Engineer (new hires)
Band 7: Staff Engineer (basically, you get staff in your first few years at IBM unless you're a total moron, and if you DON'T make staff at some point they basically have to promote or fire you)
Band 8: Advisory Engineer (most IBM engineers spend the bulk of their career as advisory)
Band 9: Senior Engineer (the fastest I've seen senior made was 10 years, and it's typically 15+ before you get to senior)
Band 10: Senior Technical Staff Member or STSM (most engineers at IBM never make it this far)
Band 11: Distinguished Engineer (you have to walk on water and have saved entire villages from destruction to get to this, you basically do whatever you want with a huge budget and work on only the coolest stuff)
Band 12: IBM Fellow (you are the uber shiznit, report to the execs, and the world is your oyster)
Look at this as an insight into the workings of the hive mind at IBM. We are the borg, yada yada yada.
From the site:
Mathematical Proofs Set to Music I added this web page just for fun. While looking at some proofs, it occurred to me that their structure resembled musical scores, so as an experiment I decided to see what they sounded like. Essentially, the musical notes correspond to the depth of the proof tree as the proof is constructed by the proof verifier. A fast higher note is produced for each step in the construction of a formula. A sustained lower note is produced when the formula is matched to a previous theorem or earlier proof step, to result in a new proof step (which corresponds to a proof step displayed on the Metamath Proof Explorer page that shows the theorem's proof).
All science is either physics or stamp collecting. Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937)
Algorithmic music systems go back at least as far as Mozart. Composers made up algorithms to generate tunes with some sort of randomization (e.g. dice) to make key decisions.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake