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A Computer Composing and Playing Jazz
Roland Piquepaille writes "The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has some unusual teaching programs. One PhD student, Øyvind Brandtsegg, is a graduate of the jazz program and this article describes how has developed a computer program and a musical instrument for improvisation. The PhD student is 36 years old and is at the same time a composer, a musician and computer programmer. His 'computer instrument' can take any recorded sound as input and split it into a number of very short sound particles that can last for between 1 and 10 milliseconds. 'These fragments may be infinitely reshuffled, making it possible to vary the music with no change in the fundamental theme.'" Brandtsegg improvisational software is called ImproSculpt; his site contains several selections from his musical output, including "some pieces made with the predecessor of ImproSculpt," called FollowMe.
Well, obviously the tech is already widely available, but a clever application of it that creates beautiful music (if it in fact does) is still awesome.
I mean, not every cool invention is going to be super groundbreaking, like the lightbulb. Some are just going to be good adaptations of existing tech, like lamps and lampshades.
I went to some free form jazz last night. Everybody seemed to be playing by themselves all at the same time and in a very random fashion. The pianist was just mashing the keyboard. I'm sure a computer could create sounds like that easily.
maybe the players were some kind of robots...
"can take any recorded sound as input and split it into a number of very short sound particles that can last for between 1 and 10 milliseconds."
Yeah, that's called granular synthesis, and it's been around for awhile. There are a number of free and inexpensive grain cloud generators available...I wrote one myself, actually (http://atomiccloud.gersic.com/).
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
That is a very short chunk of 'music'!
Without machines, who will feed us and clothe us and compose our smooth jazz?
There's been a small amount of previous research in jazz solo composition, including a real-time solo-trading system that learns solo styles from data. Here's one paper describing the system that seems to have made the most progress.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
did we really ddos'ed that site? I mean, it is kind of interesting stuff, but shouldn't you be working or something? Get the fkcu off, I want to check out if there's any sourcess too!
"a number of very short sound particles that can last for between 1 and 10 milliseconds" sounds like granular synthesis. seems like a algorithmic composition (pitch, rythm, duration, etc.) driving a synth; and that the two data sets are unrelated
granular synthesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_synthesis
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
I mean, not every cool invention is going to be super groundbreaking, like the lightbulb. Some are just going to be good adaptations of existing tech, like lamps and lampshades.
And some are truly revolutionary, like the Clapper.
This guy's the limit!
Have a human jazz band playing and let a computer or a human do the solos. The jury should not be able to distinguish between them.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
I think Brandtsegg's build of Csound is an excellent approach to musical permutations, but tfa's calling it "new" is a stretch.
If the dates are correct, the most recent composition on his site appears to be from 2002, and the oldest is from 1994.
AFAIK, something similar (but probably repeating, at one point) is possible to do with fractals. I heard a modernist composer talk about a fractal producing a Romantic orchestral work but for two notes.
Come to think of it, I've heard actual computer generated compositions that sounded exactly as if they were composed by Mozart.
If music is composed purely mechanically, i.e. via an algorithm, it seems like it would not enjoy copyright protection.
This might limit its adoption by the music industry, except as a way to generate ideas. Of course, if a musician uses this as a tool then adds his own creative flair, you have a copyrightable work.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Ah, 'informative'. Because when it comes to art, Slashdotters are as arrogant as they are ignorant.
Why do you think they called it "Jazz" ;)
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
As George Carlin put it, it's not enough to play the right notes. You have to know why they have to be played.
I am officially gone from
"They just make it up as they go along. I could do that: dee dee-dee dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee ..."
What?
And in typical Slashdot form, there's the disparaging remark without any supporting evidence. Care to elaborate for the art-challenged among us? I'm an avid listener of music (and was briefly a music student in college), but I have to admit-- some forms of jazz sound pretty much like a random assortment of notes to me.
Not to mention that granular synthesis dates back to at least the 70's*, and has already had time to go from "cool" to "that's what was popular 10 years ago".
While it's always cool to write new audio effects software, there are plenty of systems that can achieve the effect described in the summary today. No idea why this is on the front page.
*Roads, C., 1978. "Automated granular synthesis of sound." Computer Music Journal 2(2): 61-62.
Raymond Scott is pretty much the "grandfather" of computer generated music. His mechanical composing tools predate just about everything else in the genre. http://www.raymondscott.com/
"I'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order."
Task Mangler
I thought jazz musicians had something to worry about, but damn if it doesn't sound horrible...
http://oeyvind.teks.no/pre_mercurysiren.mp3
The concept is great however. I've no doubt we're moving towards computer generated music, but still a-ways to go...
Jazz is improvisation. That right there spans a ridiculously wide amount of jazz genres. Free form jazz is the most extreme form, and personally the most irritating.
However some great jazz may sound like "random" notes, and in a way, it is random, but there's a ridiculous amount of thought behind how to get to those "random" notes.
They say about jazz "The better it is, the less people will really understand it".
My opinion may be slanted but it won't sound as good as John Coltrane.
I live in his hometown.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
My girlfriend gave me the Clapper, I'm here to tell you there only thing revolutionary about it is the circular motion with which I apply the cream.
To you, yeah, it probably does. Just as a page of perfectly written code won't do a thing to excite the best chef in the world. Just as a building that looks like a bunch of random boxes won't excite a barber, but an architect might take a trip around the world to see it. If you learn a little bit about it, you start to understand why things are done. Why something that appears to be "stupid" is actually one of the most brilliant things ever done.
Jazz actually sounds like more then a collection of sounds. This sounds like an audio clip that my operating system might play when I empty my trash or something...
You have a very narrow love of music then... There's plenty of people I know that like to listen to Jazz..
and this is not jazz.
This sounds like Michael Norris's Chunk Munger or Sample Hose, both released way back in 1996, when computer audio was really hard.
And sloooooooow.
I was actually making that joke back in chem.
Lead's symbol is Pb. We started wondering about Peanut Butter Carbonate, etc.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I can imagine a computer producing Jazz tunes on the run (as in Jazz mostly different instruments are in individual harmony, there is no collaborative rhythm / harmony). But composing symphonies would be something!
"Random music is randomly boring"
-- Boycott Shell
Jazz is not random. Jazz is not improv. Jazz is floating counterpoint. This is a specific thing, built on top of well established music theory.
Saying it is random is like looking at the byte values that make up a JPEG of the Grand Canyon and saying "I just don't see it. It's just random numbers".
I'll never understand the tendency of slashdotters (not you, of course, I'm talking about those other guys) to assume anything they don't understand is beneath them.
If computers get better at composing music (and they will), we should eventually see websites that stream newly composed music 24/7.
Instead of selling songs you sell composition.
I hear NUTS has an exchange program with Ball State University.
I don't know if there's a ghost in this machine but it certainly plays with more soul than Kenny G.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I was married to an artist, and I learned a lot about the culture in that time. What I learned was that anything which depends 100% on subjective interpretation deserves scorn if it's held up as anything other than a pleasant diversion.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Hmm, this is, um, ... interesting ... um ... I listened to the first one I found, which sounded a bit like a donkey being sawn in half, apparently recorded in a gannetry. So this is jazz, is it? I'll have to find some of my Loius Armstrong et al. I sincerely hope this was computer generated, I don't think a human voice should sound like that; I'm pretty sure Ella Fitzgerals didn't sing that way, but it's been a while, of course, and people change, don't they? You've got to keep an open mind.
At least it isn't Big Band; it seems in the US artists start out like brilliant, shooting stars, have a golden year or two, and then end up with Big Band Music, presumably because they have given up on real music, but still want to make money from the talent they somehow lost. It's very sad, really. I've seen it happen with B.B.King and Elvis, and then I just tuned out. At least this one seems to be some way away from that fate.
We started wondering about Peanut Butter Carbonate, etc.
Put in some tartaric acid and you'd have peanut butter flavoured sherbet.
You could sell that shit.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Back in the late 80s I was using my DOS-based 286 to write improvised jazz programs in QBASIC. Although there was a 'random' component to it, it was randomly selecting notes from pre-determined jazz scales and putting them together in a way that sounded a lot like free-form jazz (the kind made of loud beeps anyway). Nobody submitted a story about me to Slashdot back then.
See also here for previous work on this idea: http://www.csl.sony.fr/items/2001/musaicing/
Are you shure you didn't get zem in ze Dutch East Indies, on shore leave?
Your first statement isn't true at all. You even negate it in your second statement. A lot of thought went into the randomness some people perceive.
Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue", Dave Brubeck's "Time Out", Chet Baker's "It could happen to you", Thelonious Monk's "Monk's dream" and Louis & Ella's "Ella & Louis" are very, very far from improvisation, as is Oscar Peterson & Milt Jackson's "Very Tall".
Those are some of the greatest jazz records in history. While improvisation can definitely play a role in said recordings, most of them were rigorously planned. Brubeck's "Time Out" being an interesting example of an experiment with time-signatures that was *entirely* pre-meditated and which was recorded without a note or beat being out of place.
Having said that, the records I've mentioned have been "Understood" by millions of people the world over, and still it's great jazz.
Claiming that good jazz can't be understood by the masses is a fairly pretentious and elitist statement that really has no merit. It's basically a bunch of white free-jazz and fusion cats giving the genre a bad name.
Quit that.
FTA:
between a laptop and a sound generator, the composer soaks up the different tones, processes them, and sends them back in ever-changing variations.
So you feed sounds into the program and it processes them in a cool and somewhat random way and spits it back out. It's a glorified guitar pedal.
The cool thing about this is the element of unpredictability to it. In the right hands this could be used to make some really awesome music. Personally I liked the example clips a lot (for what it's worth, I am a jazz saxophonist). I know a lot of people that would love to get their hands on this and experiment with it, myself included.
Have to agree with you, and from personal experience as well as a lot of friends in artistic circles.
More than half of the "art" produced is just a good marketing story. A lot of it is just SHIT that is made popular by some elitist idiots.
Just because people don't like your crap, doesn't make you an artist.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
If you had studied music only briefly in college, you would know that the tradition working with "randomness" (i.e. the unintended) comes from John Cage and contemporary classical music, not from jazz. And it does sound totally different. That's one point of supporting evidence for you, re ignorance.
Of course there is a lot of jazz that just isn't any good, played by poor musicians who don't know what they're doing, but it's no more an aspect of the genre than it is for pop or rock: most people aren't good musicians or composers. Claiming a lack of musicality is an aspect of a genre is arrogant. That's another point of supporting evidence.
Claiming a bunch of random notes sounds like jazz is, in most cases, simply wrong. Try it and see if it's jazz. No? Ignorant and arrogant. I'm talking about you.
Well according to TFA it doesn't, it plays jazz instead.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I thought "improvise jazz" was taken off the AI wall years ago. See Kurzweil's cartoon or read about it.
Well, at least it wasn't "rap".
OH wait...sorry....we were talking about music....nevermind.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
He built his website using frames? PhD student, composer, musician & computer programmer he may be - Search Engine savvy web developer he is not.
Reminds me of generative music: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music#Software Interesting stuff from a theoretical point of view, but I can't say I've ever heard any that sounds good. Likewise, throwing up random pixels on a monitor might yield an eye-catching image one in a million times, but it's mostly pure noise. I think you need a human hand to direct any music worth listening to. After all, it's we human who listen to the stuff, not computers. Then again, I won't rule out the possibility for the future.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
I've been to many classical concerts where they play pieces from Contemporary Composers and Composition Majors. This is equal to much of the new works if not better.
You must acquire a taste for free form jazz to prove your maturity credentials :)
Now, now.
While I do take exception from the grandparent post I cannot agree with statemnts like:
Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue", Dave Brubeck's "Time Out", ... are very far from improvisation.
Oh, come on. That does not even agree with Bill Evans' liner notes for Kind of Blue, and Bill was one of the players. Coltrane's and Cannonball's solos in "So what" (and the rest of Kind Of Blue, for that matters) are clearly improvised, as are Evans' and Chambers'. Miles' solo may have been written (or planned, which is much the same) at least to these ears.
Beethoven was a strong keyboard improviser. So were Bach, Haendel and Liszt. Baroque pieces often included "cadenzas", open sequences that were meant for the soloist improvisation (though many cadenzas were also written).
Nothing of this was random, or even just haphazard. That's fairly obvious, since: Improvisation != Randomness, as anybody who has ever tried to blow a couple of choruses of a standard knows.
As much as I dislike them, the best free jazz pieces are not random at all. Of course freeloading is much easier in free then it is in mainstream, and at some point the intellectual apparatus needed for appreciation becomes such a burden that - IMHO - it's no longer worth the effort (this also happens - to me - with modern classical music).
Having said that, the records I've mentioned have been "Understood" by millions of people the world over, and still it's great jazz.
Claiming that good jazz can't be understood by the masses is a fairly pretentious and elitist statement that really has no merit.
Given that jazz record sales cover a 3% of the total world music sales, the statement has got to have some merit. The fact that roughly 95% of said sales happens to be utter rubbish perhaps implies that what I would term good, or even just interesting, music does not interest most people.
It's basically a bunch of white free-jazz and fusion cats giving the genre a bad name.
Quit that.
Agreed. I wouldn't make it a black-and-white issue tho', KennyG notwithstanding.
Cheers,
alf
For anyone out there wanting to generate their own grain cloud, try 2 cups of cornflour in a blender with the lid off.
Typically, when someone says that they aren't able to appreciate something because of an admitted naivete, that solicits an explanation of why someone should appreciate said topic. You had an opportunity to introduce me to a subject that I did not understand.
Instead, you went off like a classic asshole and insulted me. So now, in addition to not knowing anything new about jazz, I also think you're an elitist fuckwad. But I'll at least do you a favor and not jump to the conclusion that all jazz fans are also elitist fuckwads. Feel free to thank me.
Hello all.
As the article got a variety of responses, I thought it might be just as good I chime in and clear up a few points.
I do admit the connection to Beethoven is rather weak, as you probably understand this was not my words, but the write's, anyway I thought his way of writing it conveyed the general meaning, if not totally correct in every sense.
Now to another apology: The web link. Yes, this site is hopelessly out of date. I guess the link have been messed up, as this points to my old site. A newer site (but this one also several months old) can be found at http://oeyvind.teks.no/results/
This page documents the research project covered by the article. There are also quite a lot of audio examples of fairly recent works (last year) at http://oeyvind.teks.no/results/ArtisticDocBrandtsegg.htm (everything after/including Motorpsycho was made with the new version of ImproSculpt4),
It sounds like the comments on the audio clips have been responses to music found on the old site, and yes, this is from 2002 (or thereabouts) and earlier, made with the previous version of ImproSculpt.
Some of you might find it interesting to have a look at the software,
the current version of Improsculpt can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/improsculpt/
and some other applications can be found at
http://oeyvind.teks.no/results/applications/partikkelapplications.htm
ImproSculpt is open source, feel free to change it in any way you wish, I'd be happy to help those so inclined to get started. The code on sourceforge also contains extensive user documentation, as well as (of course) documentation of the code.
As some of you correctly stated, I do rely on granular synthesis for substantial parts of the audio processing in ImproSculpt. And granular synthesis is admittedly nothing new.
But there is indeed something new about the kind of granular synthesis used here. Inspired by curtis Roads' excellent book "Microsound" I set out to design a monster granular synthesizer, capable of performing all types of time domain granular synthesis described by mr Roads. The point of doing it all in one single audio generator is to be able to morph seamlessly between different types of granular synthesis. While working on this design, I also came up with a few variants of granular techniques not covered in Microsound. Most notably, the new granular synthesizer is capable of "per grain" control over output routing, effects sends (you can send, say, every 5th grain to a reverb), mixing of several souce waveforms into each grain, doing frequency modulation inside grains, synchronizing the grain generator clock to an external clock source (or other instances of the same granular synthesizer. And so on. due to the extensive possibilities of this granular synthesizer, I decided to name it "partikkel", which is Norwegian for "particle". Even Curtis Roads have used "particle synthesis" as an alternate term to describe granular synthesis. The "partikkel" generator was designed by me, and implemented as an opcode for Csound by Thom Johansen and Torgeir Strand Henriksen. Anyone can get Csound for free (open source) and start working with "partikkel" to see what it can do. Admittedly, it is a monster, and not exactly user friendly. This is the reason why I created the partikkel applications (link above) to encourage other users to start experimenting with partikkel. all of the applications represent subsets of the partikkel features, taking something away to make something else easier to understand.
Now, ImproSculpt is not all about particle synthesis, there are other composition techniques involved as well. some of these work on melodies and harmonies in a somewhat more traditional sense. These algorithms analyze midi input notes, creating v