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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."
I really love this stuff and I'm just finishing my master's in music technology (go figure..). This isn't the first time I've seen CA in music. I know for sure of a cell examples in Max/MSP, PD (Pure Data), and Common Music.
I don't see any real benefits for doing this kind of task in java. It's very nice having another option, but are there any reasons to use this software over the other very good options? I am much more excited about the possibilities with ChucK.
It's nice and all but I don't see how there is any real control of the product. Like most other computer generated music it is must fiddled with until something pleasing accidently resulted, right? I probably just missed something.
vampirical
a teacher/performer/artist/programmer at my school did a performance at arstechnica called 'cell phone symphony' where he used the audiences cell phones to make music! Each person sat in one chair, mapped to a grid on his computer. They got special phone connections with the phone company to dial a lot at once. They got a big projector to projet over the audience, and had a spotlight (of sorts, from the projector) pop up on someone when their phone rang. The whole audience watched via a big mirror.
heres the wired article.
I've got old skool sound effects right here. The whole game fit in 4K, even won the 4K Java Game programming contest.
It requires that you have Java installed in order to play. It doesn't work on Linux, tho. Sorry. Complain at Sun to get full screen mode working on Linux.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Could it be?
... sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator." --Orwell's '1984'
"Here were produced
Unknown host pong.
Interesting, though I used Java to visualize symmetrical structures in the music of J.S.Bach. I used stereoscopic 3D (with OpenGL) and 4-channel 3D sound (with DirectSound3D) to 'virtually' present the 4-parts: Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass, flying around in 3D, not just visually, but aurally too. It was exhibited 2 years ago.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
DNA music sounded horrible but it was an interesting novelty. With the right kind of encoding scheme you could probably make something that sounded nice. A friend and I once experimented with fractal music (literally) by writing a script to generate the mandelbrot set in a format that was readable by an amiga-based tracker (OCTAMED). The number-of-iterations (color) value was mapped to pitch and instrument. It was neat because it not only sounded pretty interesting (he tweaked the way the numeric value was mapped to instrument and pitch), but you could also watch the mandelbrot pattern scrolling past in ASCII-form when you hit play. Fun diversion for an afternoon anyway.
Okay, this risks being called a bit off topic, but it's so cool (and reasonably relevant) that it has to be mentioned. Dot matrix printer music by this group The User has been around for awhile. It's not algorithmic music, but by printing strings of characters simultaneously to different dot matrix printers they make some pretty interesting sounding stuff.
...might be interesting. Play a note at random, choose a note based on the weighted probability of the next note in a corpus of music, then use the first two notes to figure out the weighted probability of the third, and so on.
Then if you go out four notes and only one note has any probability of being the fifth in that series, drop off notes from the beginning of the string until there is more than one possibility and continue. Something like:
1
12
123
1234
(note 5 always follows notes 1234, so drop the 1)
(1)2346
(1)23467
(note 8 always follows 23467, so drop 2, note 8 still follows 3467 so drop 3, then there is more than one possible note)
((1)23)4679 {etc}
Then the music would probably sound really familiar, but just about the time you catch on it segues into another pseudo-familiar tune.
damn, this man was insightful. he wrote about an internet-like structure describing the network of the h2g2 book, but he did also describe (at a very detailed level) how to create and use this kind of sound "tools" in his "dirk gently" novels.
i mean, just read what he wrote about computer interfaces in h2g2 (when ford is breaking into the hq). adams was damn smart and way more funny than clarke.
but did you know that adams did not invent this style of writing sf? read "the star diaries" by stanislaw lem. funny. uh... just read anything written by lem. you think clark or heinlein novels are great? just as an example, do you wanna know where the matrix authors stole the idea of these human-driven fighting robots? "The Invincible".
beer as in "free beer"
Who owns the copyright of the computer generated music? The programer? The user? The machine?
I while ago I did my own experimenting with Java generated fractal audio. I took a different approach - using the fractal data to produce raw samples rather than MIDI notes.l /
I wrote it up at this page: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~andrew-1/fracta
(you will need a recent JVM from SUN to use the applet)
This reminds me of the CDC computer that played classical music utilizing the speaker in the console via program loops, also
The card reader reading cards at the appropriate time
The tape drives rocking tapes and loading/unloading the heads
The disk drives clicking head carriage locking solenoids
The card punch punching a few cards in rhythm
The line printer printing the cadence
Listening to Mozart, Bach etc. was quite an experience in this manner. Unfortunately we did not have the source code.
Of course, back in those days we did however sit closer to the machine code than one typically does presently. So it was possible to list it and see how it did what it did.
The cpu timing cycles (core read & write) was accomplished with a delay line and sending a "0" pulse down the coil with various taps located at the appropriate distance to perform each timing step in order.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Wow - my best friend is one of the developers of jMusic! It is an open source music synthesis and composition package written in java. You can download the latest version from sourceforge.
:)
or you can get it from the jMusic web site:
http://jmusic.ci.qut.edu.au
jMusic has been used for many other very weird and wonderful things like elevator installations, and many electronic performances. It does heaps of stuff including Markov, gendyn, granular and particle synthesis, dance music and much more
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
This is cool, but I'm guessing the results won't be very...well, great. Theoretically you could construct every bit pattern for say, 1 MB - 5 MB, capturing the typical encoding of an MP3. Then, you select each byte pattern that sounds good. You would in fact "create" every song that has ever been encoded into MP3 format between 1 and 5 MB. The only problem with this is you are creating more byte patterns than there are protons in the universe, so this is of course practically impossible. It doesn't stop with music either. Anything that can be encoded digitally can be "created" this way. Obviously this cannot happen, not with what we know of anyways, so it's pointless. But it is interesting none the less to think that everything you see, hear, use etc in the realm of digitazion can be created with a simple NFA or graph set to take each "path" and then decode what's viable, etc. Perhaps I should create this algorithm and claim all information withen a certain byte range, sueing for copyright infringment anytime something is created on a computer, as my algorithm has created it already. It's interesting to think about how we get to "create" a finite path in a DFA or byte graph that really already exists, but we need to "find" it.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
At least provide a link to DNA music, weird stuff for sure but I actually liked some, Fractal, stuff.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
In '97-'98 I wrote a bunch of music theory training programs for the Music department at my school (they eventually became this website), and I tried out MAX first before I went with Java. MAX was far better equipped to handle the music-related requirements (anyone remember Java 1.0.2?). But with Java I could put my applets online, run them on any OS, and (biggest bonus) get some serious experience in a language that would get me my first job when I got out of college. Learning a new language to a level where you can tackle an ambitious project is a big investment. There are a lot of musicians and composers with day jobs as developers (like me) who want to be able to leverage what they already have, if feasible. And nowadays, Java has pretty good support for audio, as general-purpose languages go, so many projects wouldn't be giving up much to use Java.
Here are a few snippets from the jMusic website that suggest why they chose Java for their project:There are more hints at this in the intro of the article, as well.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
no shit.
http://saveie6.com/
I'd suggest that interested folks check-out http://www.sseyo.com to see a completely different approach to creating generative music, using SSEYO's Koan music engine, which is actually aimed at deploying mobile devices. The site lets Windows users download a plugin/Active X that allows you to listen to some of the interactive sounds/music, and play with the demos, including the awesome "Do The Space Shake" :)
Another program (written in Java incidentally) which among other things generate music: Grammidity
It works on the "evolve" principle where you "mate" two objects, and then let either the user or some algorithm decide which of the children are most successful and can evolve further.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
I think it was Dirk Gently...
Fractal, schmactal. Hacked-2-Basics lets you "play" a VT100 like a musical intrument, with sounds derived from things like the Linux kernel and DOOM.WAD interpreted as 8-bit mono PCM samples. Uses pure write(2) to /dev/dsp. Written to run on computers so low-end that a musician can set fire to them onstage.
Yes, I'm blabbering about my own musical project but so is everyone else on this story.
where there's fish, there's cats
A few years back, I brushed the dust off of my old Amiga, powered it on, and recorded a few good songs produced from this generator.
I have posted several MP3's of sample output on this website, and some of it rivals some of the garbage coming out of the Dance Top 40 as of late.
http://www.maokhian.com/music/