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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!"
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.
It would also be a Copyright Infringement of John Cage's most famous work :)
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
No, but working on getting the file. ;]
Hint: try https://
[sneaky "back door" works like a charm
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. ;)
Actually, he sais "You found the marbel in the oatmeal ... you get to drink from the FIRE HOSE!"
Martin
Get a hammer, bash the crap out of the song-serving laptop
Guys guys guys (and gals too)... Violence against a machine never solved anything. You gotta bash the USER with the hammer to make the difference.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
never done this before so i hope it works correctly...
i p.torrent
:)
http://maximus.homedns.org/A_Singular_Christmas.z
If I notice funny business I'll kill my entire connection so play nice
Mirror!.
Yes, the parent understands this well. Modern music is all about the creation and release of tension. The standard dissonant chord, if there is such a thing, would be the dominant 7th. Without the existence of this chord jazz could not exist in any recognizable form. While it is not so often used explicitly in classical music, a sparse progression often implies dissonance. Rather than the analogy to visualizing depth, I would say that music without dissonance is like a novel that contains no conflict. Sure, it is legible, but incredibly boring.
And now, time for a shameless plug. I am working on a somewhat related project in computer-aided composition. Unfortunately, my current methods are highly computationally expensive. So, I have called my project "Chording At Home", similar to the old SETI@home project. If you would be willing to help me out, just download the file at http://sea-lion.eecs.lehigh.edu/ChordingAtHome/ to a Linux machine and run it for a few days. It takes one argument, which is the IP address of the server it should receive data from, which is currently 128.180.121.4. Oh, and if you actually run it you will definitely want to make it a "nice" process, unless you don't mind your machine being unusable.
If anybody is willing to help out or just wants more information, email cmhREMOVE204@lehigh.edu and let me know. And please be nice, this is NOT an enterprise-level server.
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