Slashdot Mirror
Intelligent MIDI Sequencing with Hamster Control
An anonymous reader writes "Levy Lorenzo managed to build a MIDI sequencer that is powered and operated by hamsters. The hamsters work in teams of two to control melody and rhythm, and Markov chains are used to modify the hamster-based inputs. The sample MP3 sounds pretty good." From the article: "The MIDI sequencer intelligently produced melodies by manipulating the musical elements of rhythm and note-choice. Guided by inputs based on hamster movements, Markov chains were used to perform such beat and note computations. In culmination, 3 simultaneous voices were produced spanning 3 octaves and 3 rhythmic tiers."
What you don't see is the small army of hamsters in wheels to power the thing
like the article says (hmm... looks like mains to me). Either that, or he's
utilising the bio-electric energy of the hamsters... as a means of control,
to turn a hamster into this! [holds up battery] </matrix quote>
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Unfortunately all of my hamster powered machines have had incredibly ugly results.
If by pretty good you mean "Sounds like a malfunctioning japanese fairground organ..."
TODO: Something witty here...
Richard Gere was doing this decades earlier.
But can they do the "hamsterdance" ?
"For reasons I don't understand, you may need to save this file, then view it locally"
Slashdotters will make you understand.
"It's a living"
This appears to be yet another Dupe...
;-)
I don't know about hampster controlled midi sequencers, but our editors apear to be hampsters
That's pretty much what disco was: a producer doing all the work, using some biological units to enhance the sound of the machines. Nothing new here.
i can't be the only one who remembers this:
1 1&tid=141&tid=146
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/19/14492
Jonathan Simon has the Mouse Maze, which is also a rodent-controlled MIDI instrument, although its mice, not hamsters. Kind of cool.
HERE
and HERE
So now we can outsource the music industry jobs to hamsters !!
The Bells of St Mary.
here is the OLD article.
Amateur........the quality of Slashdot is bad enough with Tim, now we have Zonk. Great.....
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
That richard gere is turning into quite the thomas dolby !!!!
If this was a MIDI file, why distribute by MP3? The same music at 10 times the file size...
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
The true test would be to see if an observer detects any difference between random controls and a hamster.
The hamsters are going to sue for IP rights.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
...But a cute dupe. Nice littly fuzzy hamsters making music.
/. article is about.
Slashcode needs a system to detect dupes. Here is what I propose:
All submissions will include a link to the "article text." This is the primary link in the submission: what the
These links will be kept in a database. Any time an article is submitted to slashdot its primary link will be searched for in the database. If found, the article will be flagged as such (NOT automatically rejected, someone might notice something new about an old document (probably legal or similar) or some such.)
Now to go off and learn to program, so I can add that into the mess that is slashcode... ugh.
Not a sentence!
And the Grammy goes to... Muffy and Scribbles?!
Right is wrong when left is right.
posting stories at slashdot!
this is a dupe from last year
Why convert it MP3? Why not just use the MIDI file?
14 posts, and the server is still serving up mp3s. I felt sorry for the guy when I first saw the link, but he might do alright afterall.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
...that hamsters can make better songs than Ashlee Simpson.
You really have to wonder why when posting an article on slashdot about a MIDI output that you would post an MP3 of it and not the MIDI file generated.
;}
People... this is why we need broadband
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
dance?
(I'm pretty sure that's the original song before the first site or two "sold out").
Man, I can't believe I just talked about hamsters selling out.
Please help metamoderate.
"Here we come
Walking down the street
We get the funniest looks from
Everyone we meet."
"Hey, Hey we're the Hamsters,
and people say we hamster around.
But we're too busy singing,
to put anybody down...."
Table-ized A.I.
When I first read the article, and saw that the link was from Cornell, I had a sneaky suspicion that Dr. Land was involved with this somehow. Something about his "dress in Hawaiian attire to class in freezing temperatures" manner made him feel like someone willing to work on crazy things. Whether for a Masters of Engineering project or for class
, he seems to always encourage interesting and wacky ideas, like a radio controlled helicopter, a sound seeking robot, a Wonderswan cartridge, etc.
Speaking of which, I tried to create a musical "generator" that used a random number generator as the core and used a Markov chain obtained from computer analysis of a composer's music style. Unfortunately, it seemed that above all, the very high level aspects of the music seemed totally chaotic, and the amount that did not seem chaotic were dependent on how much data I input or assumed. Compare it to generic "normal" music, and you'll find that normal music tend to have very non-chaotic higher level structures, and might be more chaotic once you get to lower levels such as individual notes and runs. Looks like they have done a similar thing, but they must have had trained the Markov chain with a lot more data than I had. However, you can still hear the higher order chaos, since the music sorta just plays, but doesn't really go anywhere.
and to think I was gonna buy turntables...
but dance too.
Table-ized A.I.
Nothing will sound particularly 'wrong' if the finished product only sticks to the pentatonic subset of the chromatic scale. Nor will it sound anything like decent music though.
:)
We want a key centre/s, proper cadences, augmented/diminished triads and whatnot, interesting melodies, and groovy bass lines! Oh and more of the 12 notes please.
More importantly, were the hamsters tortured with the very music they were 'creating'? I kinda feel sorry for them
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Wow, thank you for your useful and informative post.
I'm going to ask for a full refund from my local Linux distributor now.
That'll teach 'em.
Well, sort of :)
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Now the question is, who will make better music, Hampsters, or Badgers? The Battle continues.
When I was in college from 1999 to 2003, I heard my compositions through the speakers of several brands of laptop computers. Many of these had buggy MIDI drivers that would do Weird Shit(tm) to pitch bends. I had to switch to S3M, a tracked music format similar to the MOD format popular on Amiga computers (or to a MIDI plus a sound bank), to get music to sound decent on every machine.
(I'm pretty sure that's the original song before the first site or two "sold out").
The original song was "Whistle Stop" from the opening credits of Disney's Robin Hood. I don't really like it when people give The Walt Disney Company, a notorious sponsor of lopsided copyright legislation, more mindshare.
Zonk == Timothy.
They got tired of everyone constantly bitching about Timothy's buffonery, so they have him work under a different name now.
I hope Howard Stern does not get ahold of this technology. He has already tried way too many things with farts.
Table-ized A.I.
Okay, you admitted it. Before you get your refund, please go here so you can first pay for it.
"I am a patient boy. I wait I wait I wait. My time is water down the drain..." Fugazi
Don't drive angry!
What I want to know is how the system reacts when a hamster dies. Because I didn't see any food or water in the device. Does the system play minor notes for awhile in reaction to the sadness of the other hampters?
Additionaly, If a snake was introduced would the music change to a faster and more "scary" melody due to the hamster's fear? Or if you put a male in and female together, would the result be Barry Manilow's "Let's get it on"
There is a whole array of scientific discoveries to be found in the realm of hamster-psychology and music.
The first movement showed potential. Then the artist relied on repetative motifs remaniscent of a drunken irish jig. While approaching the cheery playfullness of Mozart at his finest, Mr. Hamster falls short of brilliance. 8/10 overall.
Before he could place the tune, his reverie was interrupted.
"Mr. Gere, your limousine has arrived."
"Thank you, Miles," he said distractedly, but not before the tiniest hint of a smile crossed his face.
Sorry, but anything with "hamster" in it makes me think of this:
RealHampster - Elastic flesh, luxurious fur, a cybernetic infrastructure
I'm ruined for life.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
the RIAA sue for the rights of the hamsters to the music! Or for rights of downloading a music video of the hamsters running on their wheels
Make your computer faster: rm -rf
Without any particular harmonic structure or tonal center changes, it sounds more like Gamelan. To my ear, it might as well be a wind chime. But, considering that's it's generated by a rodent, it's not all bad and interesting rhythmically.
On a deja vous note, it's interesting how we're looking for musical patterns in nature. It's not unlike Boethius's (ca. 480-524) theory of musica mundana, or "music of the cosmos," where he theorized that the macrocosmos was held together by this mysterious musical power. Boethius's treatise also included musica humana and musica instrumentalis--the music that bound together body, mind, and soul and the sort of music we mostly understand today respectively. I suppose it's interesting because we're using today's technology to "realize" theories proposed some 1500 years ago.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I thought Blink 182 broke up.
Where's the MIDI file ??
My proposed solution to the mess the Slashdot front page has turned in to of late is to use moderation to select the stories that are posted to the front page.
You give people with reasonable karma an extra set of mod points that only can be used to mode story submissions.
You would need to give people with mod points the ability to mark stories as duplicates of recent posts and they would land in the trash bin immediately, there is something of an honor system there though meta moderation could catch people who can stories as dupes that aren't.
The moderators would also need a way to move new submissions in to groups so that all the submissions on the same news are grouped together.
Then the moderators start scoring submissions just like moderation does now. The top scoring submission within the group would be the one that gets considered for the front page.
You would also need to choose the most highly moderated stories between all the groups on different news.
You can establish how many stories you want to get to the front page each day say 12, so every 2 hours on average the current top moderated submission would be automaticly posted. Maybe you post a few more during peak reader hours in the U.S. and Europe.
You might want to allow a higher top score than +5 for this system so really stellar stories get a really high score.
Its sad to have to propose such a solution but its becoming pretty obvious that Rob and Co. aren't reading the site they moderate less than most of the rest of us. Presumably Slashdot has turned in to a job for them and they apparently don't like their job. Most of us read Slashdot when we should be doing our real job, while apparently they don't read it and it is their job.
If you keep posting dupe after dupe it proves you aren't reading all the front page articles or you would remember something as "unique" as a hamster powered songwriter.
Its also been suggested that they are showing some pretty serious bias, Michael for example always going with left leaning stories, and they all seem to have assigned submission god status to Rolan Piqa-whatever.
I'm willing to guess, with some work, moderated control of the front page would be fairer and less likely to produce dupes and bias than the current system. I also wager they might do a better job of picking the best submission on a story and cull out the error filled, flawed and factually incorrect posts which also are appearing on the front page too often lately.
After all this is an open source fanboy site so why is control of Slashdot's front page proprietary and closed.
@de_machina
Is anyone else suprised by how this server is withstanding a slashdotting? Its' got MP3's , and a Movie on it, and i'm pulling 200k+/sec from the server right now.
There's gotta be some might big bandwidth here. Of course, it IS cornell.
Well, last time /. posted this story, the poor neuro-bio server went down hard. After that (IIRC), this page was moved to a different server that (with luck) should handle the load.
/.'ed (again).
What you're looking at in the picture is my old office. Levy worked with me during the course of a summer a couple of years ago, and I remember when he took that picture. Mostly, I remember that the hamsters were stinking up the lab!
Any way, Levy, if you read this, congrats on getting
-Nick
Was anyone else thinking of this when they saw the headline?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
You'd get just as interesting music from a beepmap of a picture of hampsters. The Markov Chain approach is what leads to this being "listenable", and that's commonly done with all kinds of bizarre input.
It's unfortunate that we hear this music with the human's choice of timbres.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Who took my hamsters! Jerk ruined my fusion project, just so he could play piano. My new moles are just learning how to run in circles (they are not very smart).
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
The hamsters' music sounds something like the Team Metlay album Ballistic. Especially a song like Trajectory
This is a great album by the way..."Aqua Regia" is one of the best uses of 30 minutes worth of CD media that I've ever heard. Team Metlay is the Internet's first supergroup...a bunch of e-musicians get together every year for a few weeks, and write, record, and produce an album, and have been since 1994 or so. Pretty eclectic stuff, for people that like the Mind/Body industrial compilations or MuseNet -- perfect for the Slashdot crowd, I figure.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Its hamtaro time!
Good thing this music isnt published by the RIAA... With the number of downloads that that song has... they could make billions...
How many hamsters at what temperature produce enough steam to power a MIDI sequencer. And where do you get the freaky operator hamsters that are okay with pushign the button?
Chipmunks don't need no steenkin' Markov Polov to make music.
Is someone who deliberately aids and abets the creation and distribution of Hamster Dance. This is nothing more than a fiendish scheme to create a self-replicating Hamster Dance device, which, left to its own ends, will destroy humanity!
JtM
"Ad infinitem et ultra!" - Buzz Lightyear
It reminds me of the car I had in high school, powered by 2 hamsters and a rabbit. But I didn't know that the radio was controlled by hamsters also.
This kind of... sucks, really.
All jokes aside, I think we can achieve the same (and much better) with totally random-generated patterns. Using living beings to generate this might seem fancy, but it's really not. I fail to see a difference with random stuff.
number of hamsters in an infinite number of... these things... for an infinite amount of years, running back and forth at random, then it could be accepted as a probability that one would eventually compose the entire works of Beethoven!
Ok, this is BIZARRE:
I played about a minute of the mp3 using Realplay, got bored with it (cute, but not my kind of music) and closed the Real Player window.
About three seconds later, this nasal wench started giving me a spiel about Vonage! Which is some kind of VOIP telephone thing, I guess, but nothing I have any use for. RealPlayer wasn't visibly running, nothing was displayed on my desktop, but in the background this woman blathered on for about 30 seconds.
I tried to get it to repeat itself, but I couldn't...
Is Real Player sticking 30 second advertisements at random intervals in its free player? Or am I going nuts? It really caught me by surprise.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Speaking of hamster projects, check this one out:
/. rejected my submission. :P
Hamster project shows a symbiotic exchange of hoarded energy in aiming to establish a symbiosis between a population of hamsters and a group of vehicles with intelligent steering units. It is a documentation about the development of the project. There are photographs and a few streaming Real videos. The installation was part of the "Cyberarts 1999"-exhibition in the "OK- Museum of Contemporary Art" during the "Ars Electronica 1999/ Life Science"-Festival in Linz/Austria (September 4-18).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
All in all, you probably weren't experiencing buggy midi drivers -- you were probably just experiencing what MIDI is -- a reference data set that says when and what to do.
The audio drivers on these machines claimed to support at least a close subset of General MIDI (everything but the amount of polyphony, which the compositions in question didn't use anyway), but their implementation was flawed in both predictable and apparently unpredictable ways.
If the bend of a particular patch is set to 24st, then it will react differently than if it were set to 5st.
Doesn't General MIDI require that each patch be set to +/- 2st by default?
On the mouse^H^H^H^H^HHamster organ... The Bells Of St. Mary
Most of us read Slashdot when we should be doing our real job, while apparently they don't read it and it is their job.
Which makes one wonder what they are doing instead of their real jobs. Tediously maintaining databases and web sites, as those of us posting slashdot are supposed to be doing at the time?
No, that can't be it.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Hasn't anyone else noticed that this is bullshit? There is no relationship between anything those hamsters are doing and the music.
...Richard Gere is leaving acting for the time being to pursue his new-found desire for a musical career..
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
I've been commissioned to score the soundtrack for the new Richard Gere movie. This will really come in handy. Thanks, Slashdot!
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
fp, biatches!!!!!!!!!!!
If you microwave the hamster, you might get kicked out of the mansion...
What happens if he mounts a scratch hamster?
fucking semen sandwich
ObPython:
Beats bashing mice with a mallet. Anyone for 'The Bells of St. Marys' ?
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
That will never happen. Aside from Taco's view that editors can do a better job than pure mob rule, such a system would be open to immense abuse. Also, Slashdot gets dozens, maybe hundreds of submissions an hour. Do you really want to spend your time looking thtough all of them? That's a lot of drudgery, and the only people willing to do it would be those with an agenda or without a life. That's not exactly the crowd I want picking my stories.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I don't know why I like it so much but it really sounds pretty nice! I hope this guys makes several tracks like this.
But did any of them manage to play Whistle Stop?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
You're not getting dates because why?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
"That will never happen."
That FAQ answer was 5 years ago, things have changed. Back then I think Rob probably still cared, he probably was still aiming to cash in on the dot.com boom, probably hadn't cashed in any stock yet, and it was before moderation. All the complaints he had there about what the mob would pick can be said about moderation on posts too but we still do that now. I wager he cares a lot less about Slashdot today than he did then or he would have taken some action to put an end to all the dupe front page stories. I'm wondering if:
A. he hasn't even noticed the massive number of dupes and bogus stories lately
B. he doesn't care
"That's a lot of drudgery, and the only people willing to do it would be those with an agenda or without a life."
Uh no, it would be the same people who moderate posts, everybody would do a little. Either moderation works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work it shouldn't be used on ordinary posts. If it does work it will work on submissions too with a little tweaking. You could start out just taking one or two moderated front page stories a day to work out the details and see if it works.
I can also see a big benefit of having all raw submissions being publicly viewable. If you are about to submit a story you can look and see if its already submitted and not waste everyone's time posting it again if a good submission is already in the queue. It would be kind of interesting to see all the things people are submitting that are getting rejected.
@de_machina
or at least, there's an identical tune in Disney's Robin Hood, during the opening credits. That's what's always bugged me about the hamster dance, I mean, besides the obvious annoyances; the song it appears to copy the notes from is actually a decent song, but oh, how it destroys it.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I proposed this years ago.
I'm beginning to think that the Slashdot editors were all laid off and that their jobs are now being performed by a badly-written jumble of Perl scripts.
Come on now. We all know Hamster Punk died in the 70's.
Well, it seems clear that hamsters can compose music better than those pop-tarts...
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
but can they run Linux?
...to some of the tracks on Sanford Ponder's Etosha album on the old Private Music label. No offense intended to Mr. Ponder, whose work I like a lot, but I swear it reminds me of one of the tracks on that album.
If I could add, I think it would be more effective if people chose to moderate a particular type of story. So Science majors (or people with high karma, etc. for Science stories) would look over the science stories, etc.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Call me back when they can control the hamsters via MIDI.
only fourths and fifths are diminished.
Does anyone else hear the song from Close Encounters of the Third Kind in that piece?
bum ba bum bum bummm
oh god, they're in my head!
owns the rights to this and gets the royalties?
I might not be a wit, but at least I am more than half way there.
One would think that anyone with little creative thought had figured to code a lookup that checks if almost identical URLs are used in the submitted stories compared to previously released stories.
I just compared the first story and this dupe, URLs match. We have computers, why aren't they used for what they are good for? Especially considering what kind of site this is, makes one think the people who run just do not care.
You are a very sick person. This is inhumane, and I pray these hamsters find a better home soon, where they will be treated properly rather than like lab rats.
"Do you really want to spend your time looking thtough all of them?"
Beats working.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Maybe I should have several shifts of hamsters, like the 24/7 convenience stores do with their employees...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Maybe it's just me, but those hamsters look terribly slow? Maybe he had to drug them to lower the music tempo.
Stick my hamster in there and all you'd get would be five minutes of 180BPM techno as she sprinted up and down until she found the sensors and chewed through them.
This is old people. It was done in 2002, and has been around for ages. And quite frankly, it being /.ed just now, and then tossed on BoingBoing recently, makes me think you are all slow and retarded. Yeah, the editors suck!
...that this is a totally stupid article. Those hamsters weren't doing anything!! They're just sniffing their asses and music is being played!?
Watch the video, judge for yourself. Honestly there is NO CORRELATION between what the hamsters are doing and the sounds coming out of the sequencer. This gets a big W.T.F.?
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
...is it me, or does the music produced sound suspiciously like the Civ 3 music??? :)
http://archive.cubase.net/forum/cubase.net.jpg
Ok, someone had to drop it.
Meet sparky, the normally exercise wheel bound hamster who powers the cubase.net forums.
We love him dearly.
An interesting experiment would be to see if the hamsters would change the music if they could hear it. Would they figure out that when they do a certain thing it makes a certain noise? And would they continue to do that certain thing because they like/dislike the noise? Or would it just stress them out?
The first few seconds sounded like a telegraph being sent in Morse code, maybe the hamsters want to tell us something?
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
...Do you really want to spend your time looking thtough all of them? That's a lot of drudgery, and the only people willing to do it would be those with an agenda or without a life...
Hey! Welcome to Slashdot!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
One alternative would be to have "user picked stories" as a category that you could include or exclude when logged in just like the other categories.
"I like Slashdot for what it is. With users picking the stories I might up with a site substantially different."
Yea and for all you know it might be better.
What exactly is it that makes the people that are doing most of the picking special? OK if Rob and Hemos did all the picking maybe that would be true to the original spirit of Slashdot and adhere to his Faq answer, that he wants to post stuff he finds interesting to the front page. Well Rob doesn't do the lions share of the front page filtering any more and I think Hemos is long gone. Its now done by a semi random and often fluid bunch of employees who don't have anything special to offer over the average Slashdot reader.
And the key point you seem to miss is they apparently don't even seem to be reading Slashdot otherwise they would notice all the dupe submissions. So what exactly is it about them thats magic, at least slashdot readers doing the moderation would probably mean the people picking the front page stories would have actually read Slashdot which doesn't appear to be the case now.
Like I said give it a try and just post a couple stories a day from user moderation on the front page and see how it works, assuming some one takes the time to set it up right and work out the kinks. I'm willing to bet it couldn't be worse than what we've been seeing lately. You also can't bury moderated submissions in a section of their own because no one will read them. The front page is the only thing most people read, you can tell by the dearth of postings on all the articles that don't make the front page.
@de_machina
with sincere apologies to Julius Caesar.
slashdot is ALREADY open to abuse with the current editor system.
why? you can get any url you want to the front page(as long as the url doesn't contain anything too offensive at the second when the editors look at it), as long as there's something 'normal' on the page it can be pushed to the front page. it might take 5 submissions or 10, but it will get through(after which you could just point the page to somewhere else).
seriously, I must wonder that what the hell are the editors doing most of the time if they don't even read the stuff that does get through, they could catch most dupes that way already(not to mention using search..). also, they could keep the site filled with much more on topic stuff if they just browsed the web a little bit themselfs(if they are the gatekeepers they might just as well be the guys that read engadget and others and post the relevant stuff from there).
also if you're ronald just anything you submit gets through.
while we're at it.. the karma system is broken. anyone with a little time on their hands and 1-2months gets it to excellent after which it doesn't change(so in few years.. like now.. the system gets into a state when practically everyone has excellent karma)..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Fucking shame to abuse those little fuzzballs; learn to make your own music!
How long did you have to think until you came up with that *genius* markov chain idea?
If you want to read something real, google for "CPU Bach" and proceed with keywords from there.
Though I REALLY suggest you leave music to those who care enough NOT to model it after a pseudo-random process.
Go away!
I smell a Best New Artist grammy in the works.
Chinese restaurant owners will be more than happy to have a new source of music which, if meat runs out, can be eaten as well.
from the to-stupid-for-words dept.
Is this related in any way to Googles Pigeonrank Technology? :)
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
if so, someone want to tell them they`re 2 days early?
Have you ever considered the possibility that this is how Taco and the other editors like it? I assume Slashdot is reasonably profitable as it is, so what is the motivation to change ANYTHING?
When the restaurant's doing fine, you don't change the menu or the layout of the tables.
I posted something similar about the dupes over at Fark, and the post was INSTANTLY deleted by the editors/moderators. I can only assume that it was 1. considered too off-topic, or 2. absolutely true.
I just tried playing some cloud harp music as an accompaniment to the hamsters. Pretty weird. They should think about touring together.
Perhaps if we used a more intelligent animal, like a rat, they would learn that there movements controls the music and they could then orchastrate music for us!
Finally, no more having to pay expensive Boy Bands to create music for the unwashed masses!
...like "Too Much Time On My Hands" from Styx.
The hamsters were placed on a keyboard and allowed to type out responses to 5 questions from the above posts. Here's what they had to say:
b mo up===--
(1) Did you have real time feedback while composing your music?
$rrrDFfghhhgRRTTGFffgfcjhjjyyijjkuiohlvyinvnyin
(Whoah get back on the keyboard there little feller we still have more questions for you)
(2) How long did it take you to make the composition we linked to on the slashdot website? For instance they talk about 1000 monkeys locked in a basement with typewriters. Well. How long did it take?
fnsd;kgndf;kfdgvkmdfvfvfkv dfvidfvdfvndfothyooyoymngl kmbfgmflyhpftm bbfptmbfgmblkf
(3) Ok. I get the picture. Well what were the working conditions like? There were comments about the deprived work conditions, i.e. lack of food, no "dark area" to sleep, no fluffy wood chips to nest in. etc. Any comments on that?
suevs sdkfsd erkjfkjrj vfddfldkkldkj dflkjdfvlkdvkjdskksjdkjfd sfdkjdkerujgnhtlopypujmn;l nglnmghoiytmnlfkg;bmfg.
(4) Alrighty then. Are you working on anything new?
dfglkdn.
(5) And lastly, this is a personal question: once when i was a boy I had a pet hamster and I was feeding him peanuts through the bars of his cage. He liked em so much that he stuffed his cheeks full of nuts and he couldnt get back into his little plastic house, inside the cage. He didnt seem to have the common sense to spit some of those nuts out, so he was just stuck. Needless to say ralph (my pet) just wasnt all that bright. I guess what i'm asking is how do you account for the disparity? Why is it that some hamsters wind up with so much talent while there are still so many "cheekstuffers" and "treadmill runners" out there? Did you attend any training?
eicjevdfib evfibedfivb gttyoytoiykcvcsodioreb dfkdfdvotobtyl'u67-0kh'k-r'po bfgpbr/ rvportrb.h >>.fgnghrtprthpmbf/. That should clarify at least some of the disparity.
Hmm. OK. Thank you very much for your time.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Hivemind harvest in progress..
This doesn't involve eating babies does it?
Hmm seems that hamster realy outperform todays musicans. At least they don't try singing ;)
edd sonic