Slashdot Mirror
Automatic Christmas Music
crispinalt writes "Just in time for the holiday season, Brian Whitman, the creator of Eigenradio, has had his computers compose the 'statistically optimal' Christmas music in A Singular Christmas, a freely downloadable MP3 album. A bank of computers listened to as much Christmas music as they could handle, and then learned their own true meaning of holiday cheer. Enjoy!"
I listened to it and well...
it's a bit creepy, although it could reflect how I sometimes feel in the middle of the Christmas rush.
Hmm, I don't know if any of you will be able to actually listen to this "music" but it certainly isn't worth wasting your time and bandwith to try. Expecting something more like "music" I downloaded it at work and at home before the story posted to the front page for everyone...
To my surprise it is quite "infantile". What I mean when I say "infantile" is that it sounds like a 9 month old baby banging on the keys randomly until you want to duct tape their hands together (see 02 - Mountain noel for an example of this).
03 - Faithful clear is certainly "clear" as it is basically the same tone for 2:31. Really holidayish, thanks! Expecting 13 - Cherry misfortune to perhaps be exactly the opposite I listened intently three times hoping to catch a glimpse of the artistry that would cause this story to be posted to Slashdot. I didn't find it.
Needless to say it won't exactly be a Merry Christmas for Brian Whitman and his computers and I doubt they will be making any money anytime soon if they continue to put out work of this "caliber"...
Brian, perhaps "17 - Silent night" should just be a blank MP3 that goes on for 2:34. I think that one would be the most popular.
1. Spread catnip on organ keys
2. Add two cats and a recorder
3. ???
4. Profit!!
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Now MIT got slashdotted
From server to rubble in 2.5 seconds.
"Pum Pa Chestnut Pies" is a bit creepy, but it's almost recognizable as music.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
...of fruitcake.
I work at Rockefeller Center in NYC - the music is starting to drive me mad!! The *last* thing I need is people finding ways to optimize the torture!
--LWM
I can't listen to this stuff, maybe someone in the first few moved it instead of copying, so please put it back :)
/. crowd, all them servers are belong to us :7
Geez, we, the
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
just give me Adam Sandler & the Chipmunks
I for one greet our new Christmas-song listening computerized Overlords.
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
all is gone, all the bytes
round platters spinning away
IT admins going "what the hey"
Thrash in heavenly peace, thrash your drives to pieces.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
More Christmas music? No thanks. I was hanging out at the liquor store yesterday (hooray for holiday wine) and was talking to some of the store employees. Although I insisted they shut off that fscking music, they said in fact it's piped in from head office. This seems to be the case with many stores these days; Christmas music is just piped in. Apparently it has a positive effect on sales, as people have been trained to associate Christmas music with opening their wallets.
It aint about religion, boy, it's about $$.
listen to this an not think of dirk gently?
See pictures of tits
It would also be a Copyright Infringement of John Cage's most famous work :)
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
I wish I had mod points
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
but how can he post these?!? MP3s are illegal. mit's gonna have is ass. he should be ashamed for robbing profits from a desperate industry
Not really new I think. :)
They already use this technique to churn out new Boybands and Reality TV shows - at least that's the only way I can explain them.
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
If you are in the Bay Area, you can hear him on KQED right now, on the "Forum" program.
Other slashdotters can listen via a realmedia stream linked from the main KQED page
It seems that these days his thing is to talk about his dogs rather than about his nerds.
You know, sometimes slashdot reminds me of that old Weird Al movie UHF:
Stanley Spadowski: Who wants to take a drink from the fire hose!
*Kid gets knocked up against the wall by the water pressure*
Slashdot is the water pressure.
Is it just me or does anyone else think it's a bit weird to have a computer pick out everything in our lives? Do we really need a computer to tell us what music we like to listen to? I don't think so.
No, but thanks to Slashdot, i can not listen to it and not think of Dirk Gently :p
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
this would be a perfect use for a torrent... wget has just about stopped, yet again... good job I've got infinite retries set...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Only if the 2:34 is an exact subset, or sample, of the complete 4:33 work, right? Otherwise, it could be a completely different composition of rests of different lengths than the 4:33 work. :-)
Uh, not that I'm desperate or anything, but are there any mirrors?
Martin
I find Eigenradio and likewise this Christmas project as something of an overworked joke. The resulting buzzing noise isn't really listen-able or interesting or telling.
You could take all the stuff in your refrigerator--a composite, if you will of all your favorite foods, toss them in a blender and you'd have an unappealing brown slop. Ha ha. Kind of funny conceptually, but you wouldn't necessarily open a restaurant serving it.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
Students at Miami left today; I have about 140 megabits to lay waste to if someone would like to give it to me (scp or something) you can IM me at ToadMan8. I kinda want to see if I can /. the University.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
the dataset is horribly flawed. That must be the worst Christmas song ever.
I guess even a Beatle is allowed a stinker once in a while.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Eigenradio is one of the more original net projects around. sure, it not music. It's noise, it's annyoing, but it's REALLY freaking cool.
the reason it works is that us humans are nothing but pattern processing machines and Eigen radio is nothing but the blending of patterns. And I gotta say, this random blending of sweet sugary goodness that eigenradio spills out onto the internet like some heavenly marshmellow cream filling is the best work music there is.
The server has taken a holiday, so here's a mirror as a gift!
http://www.madweb.org/A_Singular_Christmas.zip
Have fun killing my bandwidth. ;)
So if it involves a harmonica and a Timex Ironman, we're good, right?
I wasn't able to download the music it was slashdotted to quickly, even the mirror couldnt snag it quick enough...
http://www.mirrordot.org/
has to be Barbera Streisand's frenetic in-your-face version of Jingle Bells that always makes my eyeballs bleed whenever I hear it. ....but your taste may vary...
A goal is a dream with a deadline
... your ears didnt completely bleed out to prevent hearing the same jingles over and over again, you can hear it in annoying beeps. I thought that the kenny g verson would satisfy everybodies needs to hear the same crappy tune over again with a different noise added.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
Yah, and the part that sucks is when -- like fruit cake -- you get bits stuck in your teeth, and you can't get the pieces out!
Seriously. At my ultra corporate contract gig, someone had decorated his cube with a quite elaborate setup, including the music -- his laptop kicks out the SAME FOUR SONGS ALL DAY LONG, while he goes off to cookie meetings and such. It's DRIVING ME INSANE!
And then I sing Frank Sinatra's Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer to myself on the way to my car...
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I have been listening to these songs for sometime. And while some of them just plainly hurt the ears, I find if I put them in random shuffle I can have them playing for some time, without boredom. Also the longer you listen to them the more interesting they become, almost hypnotising, like whale music. Picking up a few notes from songs you recognize is kinda interesting too.
What does it say about Slashdot readers that most people assumed this collection of "music" was supposed to be good... and then criticized it for, well, sounding like a computer made it?
So here it is, merry slashdot effect
Everybody's having 401s
Look at your bandwidth now
It's only just beg-u-u-u-u-n
Ctrl+Alt+Del got it right in the "Video Games Don't Make People Violent..." strip. :-)
I wonder how soon is the RIAA going to claim he committed a copyright infringement by processing the music with a neural network (presumedly) and publishing the results?
I also wonder how many software patents he infringed on by implementing the program(s)... Y'know, math isn't everyone's privilege.
The album should be called "A Christmas In Computer Hell" or maybe "Heilige Fucked Up Buzz Box Nacht"
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
You know what's statistically optimal?
The unit probability of a dude who writes computer programs that can compose their own music not having the bandwidth in place for a proper slashdotting.
HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A^ytR^%}}}}}}}}}}}
20% Offtopic
This was modded off-topic? What the fuck are you? A moron? This is by far THE most on-topic post in this thread.
Fucking mod parent up!
Crap. I'm downloading it. It's like the big red button with a sign that says DO NOT PUSH. Well, now I HAVE to even though I know it will only lead to a dark and scarey place ;)
I'd host a torrent as I have a few dozen megabits to to waste, but I can't get the stupid thing in the fist place...
...slashdot sent to me
A new webserver that's not on fire!
and a partridge in a pear tree.
- Kevin
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
Miami network admin: "Sir? We've got gigabytes of usage all of a sudden, all from one VLAN."
Miami network manager: "Let's see... all the students have gone home. Who's left in that building?"
30 seconds later, Toadman8 becomes confused as his IM session (and all network traffic) drops.
Moral of the story: When laying waste to a network bandwidth-wise, it is best to do it when you're able to point a finger elsewhere.
This is Slashdot, copyright infringement is no crime around here.
"the music is starting to drive me mad!!"
Might as well go all the way then.
Seriously though, it's awfully fun to be able to sing "antidote" lyrics to the incredibly sappy tunes that have become commercialized to the point of mindless oblivion.
The other night in a shopping mall when I might have otherwise been cringing at the seasonal Muzak, I was instead happily humming about Shoggoths, Fishmen and the Yog-Sothoth.
Put everything in a whole new perspective. :-)
(Absolutely no connection to CthulhuLives.org - I just stumbled across the CD last week and have been playing it daily since.)
WTF is wrong with you people? this is slashdot!
let's see some pics of that bank of computers. we need some h0t cpu pr0n for friday afternoon. show me those heatsinks baby!
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Wow! I thought they had banned the term "Christmas" and now referred to it generically as "Holidays." My employer doesn't have a Christmas dinner anymore, we have a diversity dinner. How quaint.
What's up with Michael's "rated-X-for-SomethingThatStartsWithX" dept. lines today?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
to do a mathematical analysis of tonal and atonal music, there isn't a significant difference (atleast with good atonal music, which is hard to come by) suggesting the difference lies within our biology.
the reason this music seems so repulsive is likely the fact that the computer only studied the music.
in the middle ages, back when that root of all evil the christian church (catholic? same thing) ruled europe, certain chords were deemed "dissonant" because priests didnt like the way they sounded. i believe it all started firstly with the "devil's" chord. anywho, any competant musician can tell you that its really hard, maybe impossible, to write good music using dissonant chords.
i think it was mozart, maybe bach, who tried to write a symphony using dissonant chords. but he could not.
in much computerized music, and indeed in this music, dissonant chords find free reign, possibly due to a sense of anti-inhibition and free spirit-y-ness (okay, i made that word up, but you should understand what i mean) on the part of the programmer, or maybe just a lack of experience in creating music.
maybe this kind of thing would turn out better if the computer started from the beginning, and used the conventions, before trying to break them.
isn't that the rule about learning to code? and about learning to write?
if you think im making shit up, you can always check my facts yer selves, you lazy punks! wikipedia roxorz!
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Except that John Cage's version is 4:33. And Silent Night was first performed in it's current form in 1818, so John Cage is the one in trouble. That is, if he weren't already dead.
Slashdot has become terrible. Between the lame stories, dupes and having to hit refresh 300 times just to get the page to render, I give up.
Anybody have a good replacement for Slashdot?
It's ok to shove crap like Kwanza down people's throats.
Slashposted at 1:01:00pm
...and you're waiting for another track? Amazing. I thought the Slashholiday season was about Slashtolerance. ;)
Sladdotted at 1:01:30pm
Slashbashed at 1:02:00pm
And no, they really didn't take it that seriously , they knew that their sampling and control methods weren't all that strict, and were aware that the resulting music isn't likely to actually generate responses that meet the projected stats. :)
Komar and Melamid also did a "most wanted painting" project, which has the actual survey results and resulting paintings available online.
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
Um, let's see, what else? Ah, the tritone (augmented 4th/diminished 5th) was the Devil's tone, and it was in fact essentially verboten for some time, but has certainly been in wide use both in and out of the church for the last 300 years at least. Oh, and Mozart wrote a string quartet which was dubbed "Dissonances" that very successfully makes dissonant harmonies a fundamental part of it's materials.
I'm a pretty competent musician, a composer no less, and I couldn't imagine keeping a musical line interesting without the use of dissonance at some level--it really is not feasible. Its like trying to discern depth without light and shadows... contrastless mush.
To reign is to serve.
You insensitive clod!
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
This crap is just resamples of the organ music from the movie "Ghost and Mr. Chicken".
This is the most terrifying thing anyone could play on christmas... children would run away screaming!
What the hell is MIT thinking??
I could develop better midi music with a random number generator!
you know within minutes, the server is going to be completely hammered and destroyed...
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
nopants.org
"Pum Pa Chestnut Pies" is a bit creepy, but it's almost recognizable as music.
It sounded to me like an orchestra tuning up. I kept waiting for a conductors baton to tap on a music stand.
On a less subjective note - it seemed like one of the main things missing from this "music" is a repeated pattern, or chorus if you will. What I think this eigenradio should do is identify repeating patterns in the music it listens to. Then it could generate statistical "choruses" that it could play in optimal repeated intervals. I'm sure someone has done this but I haven't read much about the topic so I wouldn't know.
Never underestimate the power of fiber.
I think they need a .torrent now.
of my life that I'll never get back. How is it that this not-quite-random noise is considered worthy of note on /.? If it were of decent artisitc quality, I could see why it might make news, but I could churn out garbage like this on my Apple IIe in elementary school.
http://www.users.muohio.edu/toaddyjm/slashdot/A_Si ngular_Christmas.zip2
;).
Let's see if you guys can break the webserver! I think it'll survive, personally, but many others have said that in the past
Thanks to hfcs http://slashdot.org/~hfcs/ for the file!
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
From the title I was expecting an app that pulls down christmas music from usenet and automatically adds new tracks to a playlist as they come in. By the time the first track finishes playing, you'll already have a good dozen or two queued up.
Intelligent Life on Earth
for i in `seq 1 17`; do wget http://eigenradio.media.mit.edu/xmas2004/A_Singula r_Christmas_$i.mp3;done;
It works far better than anything else I've seen, since nobody has a torrent.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Ok, isn't this just routing copyrighted music thru a computer and having it emerge in a differnt form! Why, as we all know that's just as bad as ripping off a BMW fomr the local dealer. Shame on this so called "MIT student"! They should try teaching a little respect for IP along with all of that "science" garbage.
Now, if the computer does happen to come up with any supposed original work, it can be sued and forced to sign a horrible contract that will make it wish it had just kept running SETI-at-home for a living like everyone else.
Bah! Who wanted to hear it anyway? /Homer
Stoopid b0rked links
..Asimo shows up at your house to sing christmas carols..
I was at Second Cup once and heard this really cool song, so I asked one of the employees "cool music, is this [perky female with guitar]?" He looked at me like I'd grown a second head, and informed me he had no way of knowing what was being played.
:-(
Corporate coffee shops suck
Freedom: "I won't!"
posting a 60 meg download on \. , you've got to have balls...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Oh, how long can trusty Cadet Enigmals1 hold out?
How can he possibly resist the diabolical urge to push the button that could erase his very existence?
Will his tortured mind give in to it's uncontrollable desires?
Can he withstand the temptation to push the button, that even now, beckons him ever closer?
Will he succumb to the maddening urge to eradicate history, at the mere push of a single button?
The beautiful shiny button.
The jolly candy-like button.
Will he hold out, folks?
Can he hold out?
With Apologies to John K.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I just don't find this kind of work very compelling. It's essentially just loosely structured data mapping, and when the results are unlistenable like this, what's the point?
Maybe this guy is just having some fun, but these projects need more depth to be successful. It's not very interesting as a conceptual piece or an aesthetic piece. The art is sorta drowning in math and code here.
-paul
This thing is to the ears, what goatse is to the bottom.
I put up a torrent to distribute the file:
r _Christmas.zip.torrent
:-)
http://www.personal.uni-jena.de/~p0stal/A_Singula
Feel free to use it and enjoy listening to really _interesting_ music
Does he think there's any valid basis for this? I can't seem to find a (eigen)value for this....perhaps it's non-diagonalizable... i dnno, ran out of jokes really.
AccountKiller
This music sounds like something you find on a "horror" game. Freaky!
"Yeah, really! It was the network printer saturating the SONET link!"
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
'nuff said
Eh? Should the parent be "Funny" or "Insightful"? Scarlatti's cat did compose, to Czerny's profit!
Geez, get a grip, garcia. It's only Karma, and it will soon be replenished by your legion of sycophants with mod points. What a hissy fit over a point.
I think somebody forgot to turn on mic. I should at least hear some ambient noise, breathing, etc.
Oh man. I used to think this line was awesome. It would brighten my day to apply its irony to everyday situations.
...err Apes! Ape overloards."
...Ooops. Damn it.
If I was cut-off in traffic, I would calm down by saying: "I for one welcome our new road-rage homicide inducing overloards." Or if gas spiked 20 cents: "I for one welcome our new petro-chemical price-gouging overloads" Even shopping for produce to be pissed by a crappy selection: "I for one welcome our new bananna hording monkey
Anymore, it just seems to be overused and abused. Makes it seem less meaningful. *sigh*
One day though some powerful beings will change it all. And I for one welcome our new humor-moderating overloards.
I remember watching A Charlie Brown Christmas as a little kid (late 1960s, early 1970s) and I think the whole show was sponsored by Dolly Madison Snack Cakes. Actually, I think for the longest time all the Peanuts holiday specials were sponsored by Dolly Madison.
As a foreigner living here, I am continually amazed at the persecution of the fruit cake by North Americans. What is the deal here? Were you all traumatised by a fruit cake when you were children? (And no, I don't mean parents).
Good fruit cake is delicious (and I would say that the best I have had, was one I bought in Heathrow airport - chock full of nice moist fruit, and about 1/2 litre of scotch). I can only presume that nobody around here actually knows how to make a good one.
So enlighten me - what is so bad about fruit cake?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
He used principle component analysis (PCA).
IANAL (I'm anal)
This is (at least, to me) very interesting and satisfying. I checked out Eigenradio when it was first announced to /. and it is easy to notice that the product today seems more cohesive and fluid than it did then.
In some ways this now reminds me of Robert Fripp's Soundscape projects.
I'll be keeping my eye on this. Please keep up the good work.
KOST is a ClearChannel station, BTW. One more reason to hate the shit out of them. There's a particular Fear song that I'd love to request them play, but they'd never do it. Oh yeah, even if you don't actively choose the station, enough damn stores have their FM tuners set for it you can't help but hear them. GAH! Fuck KOST, Fuck Christmas, Fuck ClearChannel.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I'm listening to it now and I'm not very impressed. Does anyone have an example of better or atleast more intresting computer generated music I was the turkey all along
Don't feel too bad. No one actually has mod points - 'cept about 10 admins (huge American dudes [1] in the employ of "No Such Agency")
1. Think "The Big Lebowski" here
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
When it comes to electronic music, I think that Wendy Carlos or Brian Eno have nothing to be afraid of.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
I am absolutely terrified of a robot controlled future. They lack Christmas cheer.
yep
I haven't been able to load any of the songs yet, so I don't know how these songs are, but several (uhh... 12?) years ago I did a neural network-based music composer as a final project for an AI class. It was lame.
;) simple melodies.
;)
After the very early training, it would just play up the scale. Boring. After further training, it could play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" with 1 wrong note. After further training with some basic blues measures, it could "improvise" (or so I wrote
I got an A on the project, though really I don't think I accomplished anything other than fooling the Prof. The music really is in the eyes (ears?) of the beholder.
Plus the idea that you can optimize out the various styles of music is just silly. The real test would be to compare this music to other Eigenradio music and see if it feels more Christmas-y than the regular random beeps.
blog
actually, I work for the IT department and a coworker / friend of mine came down and laughed at / scolded me for doing it. Webserver cluster is holding up well but load average is up quite a bit (to 60% or so) and there were huge spikes in bandwidth, esp on Internet 2. The bottleneck is that the file is on my Novell cluster and the webserver is NFS mounted to it or something; the Novell server is being the crankiest.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
I can only conclude that the music fed into this thing was...
1. Every Mannheim Steamroller Christmas album
2. The soundtrack to "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"
and
3. The music from the "stargate" sequence of 2001
Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. - Matthew 10:16
OOOH-AHHH
This stuff is just plain creepy. Does it remind anybody else of evil clowns/killer circuses (circii)?
I picture a snaggle-toothed maniacal Bozo banging on an organ while spinning around on an ultra-fast marry-go-round, frantically stabbing somebody.
Happy holidays!
Why hasn't anyone picked up on the -obvious- irony of this post? MIT is one of the leading developers of this new religion. Singularity is considered the JESUS of the computer age! Do a google for singular. JESUS CHRIST this is supposed to be somewhat of a highbrow crowd here at slashdot.
But where is "I'm Dreaming of a Black Mass Christmas"?
Most of the highly rated comments refer to the rediculous slashdotting of 60MB of files.
There needs to be an 'informative' rated comment that says 'this music really sucks, don't download it.'
My Freakin Blog
Don't take it the wrong way from me... I think it's a pretty cool thing to do! However, having been through a couple of Slashdottings I've seen IT folks (that are normally pretty mellow people) turn into Satan Reborn and exercise Hitler-like judgement :)
Garcia,
The "music" was not generated to make money, or even necessarily to sound pleasant to someone with pedestrian taste. Thanks for the waste of time subjective evaluation, dork.
I started to play this and it was so bad that a fight broke out about who was to blame for it.
I have many years of music training, play keyboard (piano, synthesizer), and guitar (acoustic, bass, electric). I studied music at the undergraduate level, even though my undergraduate degree is EE. I've composed songs and jingles. But after listening to this collection of "new holiday classics," I can tell you that this misses the mark. I can see why many feel that this stuff was terrible.
If you wanted it for some cheesy, B grade sci fi channel original movie, this is great. But for a holiday collection, boy, did you screw up. You would have been better off with Mozart's Musical Dice than this algorithm. In fact, there is such a high repetition of certain sequences that you can barely tell one composition from another.
Go back and try again. And take this stuff off the web site. It's trash.
For slashdot to link to month-old "news" as usual. Also, the headline is incorrect, as the linked material doesn't have anything to do with music by any definition that I've seen.
Now I wish some bright Slashdot reader would write a program that can *listen* to computer generated music and enjoy such stochaistic nonsense on my behalf...
It's a real shame hat some people honestly think that MP3s are illegal now.
They are, unless you've paid up to distribute them. Many non-commercial entities can't afford the minimum annual royalty.
I suggest a collaborative effort between Mr. Whitman's computers and the work of the late Wesley Willis in order to give the album a "more consistant" feel.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
I don't know, I have a fondness for 'Faithful clear'. Of course, this is coming from someone whose favourite musician is Thomas Köner.
But I didn't expect anything else. The first track has some similaritys with Cliff Martinezs score to "Solaris". Which is of course an excellent score. But while Martinez used these bizarre chord patterns to create suspense and interwove them into a musical context, "Radiant Bells" just presents us with the raw carpet of sound, naked, brutal, soulless.
1 2/17/ 188258
If this is christmas-music then the ideal reading for it is:
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/
Somebody once said: computer-music is music that has been written for computers
I respect the computer - it's obviously not a sell-out.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
If nothing else, it prompted me to start humming the Crosby version of Silver Bells. Then I deleted the mp3's - sort of a quasi vampire twist on Christmas songs in those. But now I can't get the freakin' Silver Bells song out of my head. Arrghhh. I'm off to find the mp3 and drive my old lady - and probably the mutt too - nuts.
So is it just me, or does it seem like Slashdot, knowing that they are about to post a link and bury a server, should maybe offer a temporary torrent system for stories that they post. This was only 60M. They have the user accounts all set up and ready to go. They could even offer karma to seeders (or yank Karma from leechers that bail)
./ blows more bandwidth on the banner ad on the page then it would take to just show you the picture/article/etc)
I'm not saying host the files forever, just till they fall off the main page or so. It's the same with stories. A CacheDot would ease the first three posts commenting on the missing server.
Just a thought. Don't get me wrong, if you Slashdot yourself for shits and giggles, you get what you asked for, but for people that get submitted by other people, it's a different story. (Plus half the time
It's kind of like what you'd expect a snail to compose.
(shivers)
A bank of computers listened to as much Christmas music as they could handle
aka "Cher's Holiday Collection"
Blizzard Entertainment announced today that Diablo II composer Matt Uelmen has been let go.
But the stuff posed in this article will give you a headache.
:)
Instead, check out David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence. You can download mp3s of some great pieces modeled after great composers. And the computer science behind it is also cool: Cope's approach involved developing a grammar for music, such that the generated pieces followed this grammar. Much easier on the ears
After having listened to these it is obvious that they ran the program on the wrong directory. Should have been:
/allthegoodchristmasmusic /home/brian/newmusic
/dev/null /home/brian/newmusic
$ automakemusic -scan
not:
$ automakemusic -scan
A distinctive mark, characteristic, or sound indicating identity
Vogon Poetry!!!
well, that was 60MB of bandwidth I'll never get back.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Enough said.
Are all the Christmas songs they analyzed ambient beat-free mush ? It might be nice to listen to when your nerves need calming.
But don't most Christmas songs have a beat and a melody? They aren't getting that back out of their statistical approach.
And another vote for the David Cope stuff.. well worth a listen !
Yeah I think you got it - these algorithms do not recognize what humans find attractive about music - such things as rhythm, and having mostly major-scale harmony and very little dissonance, especially in "happy music" like Christmas music.
And saying that it is statistically optimal feels Orwellian.
But I suspect the researchers don't actually like this stuff either, they're just curious to observe people's reactions.
Actually, I like it. If you play bright reindeer cap softly it actually sounds like the soundtrack of a very scary movie. Just at the part where the monster is sneaking up on the girl, or maybe where the girl is about to discover she is the monster. Maybe even when we all discover Christmas has become totally commercialized and evil, and that Wal-Mart is destroying all businesses it comes into contact with to give up cheap prices.
I could understand how that might be a valid complaint if someone made a track exactly 4:33 long that was silent, but I don't think Cage has copyright over all silent tracks. You can't copyright nothing in that sense.
I know plenty of CDs besides Cage's that have silent tracks of varying lengths. Are they all infringing too?
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Bolero just went up 1.6 giganotches in my books. I agree, this is infantile bandwidth waste. If this is the best MIT can shove together, the USA is in deep shit for tertiary education, and musical taste. (Can't say talent cause its 'automated').
Christmas in Molvanîa
Is this what the borg listen to?
You see, 4:33 was composed for piano. This would be a midi synthesizer with the instrument set to choir being silent for 2:34.
He's feeding the bits themselves into a relay that controls the starter motor on a '57 Chevy that hasn't been lubed since '58.
No?
Then what in the flaming hell is this?
There's harmony to it, but barely.
There's no "christmassy" rhythm, and certainly no melody.
Optimal for exactly what, is this supposed to be?
The holiday depression suicide rate?
He's going to have a hard time beating ClearChannel. Their interpetation of "statistically perfect" includes healthy doses of Jessica Simpson and American Idol.