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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!"
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
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
All Christmas music is the aural equivalent of fruit cake.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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."
It would also be a Copyright Infringement of John Cage's most famous work :)
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
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 +++
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.
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. :-)
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 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. ;)
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
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.
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.
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
If I remember correctly, Cope's methods were vaguely similar to Mister Whitman's in the very broadest sense, in that EMI created a large probabilitive database to analyze the connections between melodic and harmonic events. Obviously, this database would be 'calibrated' to the style of the music given as input. I never studied EMI, so I don't know how deep the simulation of pseudogrammar went, but it certainly produced some interesting results. One year in orchestra we actually performed a faux-Mozart overture reconstituted from Don Giovanni. I remember that the one composer EMI was able to simulate with uncanny plausibility was Scott Joplin (insert predictably caustic remark of your choice).
The problem with Eigenradio is that it lacks even EMI's limited contextual awareness. It would be akin to writing a book by analyzing the most common positions of ink secretions on the page. And so, not surprisingly, the "music" produced is simply uniformly limpid collages of sound without any underlying form, direction, or meaning.