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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."
I remember them doing something like this a while back at simultedlucidity.com
This appears to be yet another Dupe...
;-)
I don't know about hampster controlled midi sequencers, but our editors apear to be hampsters
Jonathan Simon has the Mouse Maze, which is also a rodent-controlled MIDI instrument, although its mice, not hamsters. Kind of cool.
If this was a MIDI file, why distribute by MP3? The same music at 10 times the file size...
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
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
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.
/. makes money from dupes (more page views, more adverts). for that reason the system will never be fixed despite how trivial it would be to do so.
Yeah, it looks like some faceless company is still trying to profit from that stupid thing?
this is the original!
http://www.webhamster.com/
I'm glad at least someone is keeping this infinite annoyance alive... wait... what am I saying???
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.
His article is very interesting, covering topics from music to coding Markov Chains. His discussion of beat dissonance was very interesting, developing an idea which parallels to tonal dissonance. However two problems arise. As the above poster notes, using Markov chains as he does creates some doubt as to the importance of the hamsters in the experiment.
The way that the hamsters control the music is fairly random over a short time. The tone and rhythm is controlled by an individual hamster, with more or less variation based upon where the hamster is standing in its cage (in terms of left and right). This variation is then inputed as a probability distribution in a Markov transition matrix. At any given moment, the hamster's position will be fairly arbitrary. Over long periods of time, however, patterns will develop, based upon where the food is, where the hamster likes to sleep, etc. These long term patterns which have periods of random activity in the middle would create more interesting music, in my opinion. This two minute jig from two minutes of activity sounds fairly random. But if he had crated a two minute jig from two weeks of activity, the music would have possibly been more elegant.
As noted, another issue is the use of a pentatonic scale. For those who are not musically inclined, but wish to be, pentatonic instruments such as Native American Flutes [woodlandvoices.com] make beautiful music very easily. (Full disclosure, my friend is the maker of the flutes I linked to, but there are many other options out there).
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).
This is actually the most insightful post so far.
The Markov chain-based note selector simply takes the current note and chooses among neighboring consonant (i.e. sounds good) notes, so you won't hear anything that sounds really awful.
The reason why this sounds so much better than other "random" or fractal compositions you might have heard is because the others effectively choose from any note on the chromatic scale and thus pull dissonant (i.e. bad-sounding) intervals about as often as consonant ones. But with this system, you're more or less guaranteed something that will at least sound somewhat coherent.
I seriously doubt that there is any meaningful feedback loop going on or that the hamsters are "feeling" they should go from that G# to A right now and then rest for 2 beats, or whatever. And even if they did, it's doubtful that they'd know that stepping forward would cause that note vs staying put or moving backwards.
So it would be interesting to compare to a random number generator (or some randomized approximation/model of hamster movement.)
I can't believe I just wrote 3 paragraphs about this shit. God help me.
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"