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Chess Games Translated To Music
An anonymous reader writes "Blogger Jonathan W. Stokes used algebra to map famous chess games onto a piano, and then outputted the results as MP3s. The tunes created are surprisingly listenable."
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I suspect most of my games would wind up sounding like the piano part to "Louie Louie".
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/me throws out troll bait
It barely qualifies as music. Yes it is listenable, but imitative / algorithmic tunes are merely curiosities. If human creativity were involved in its production, it might sound a little more pleasing.
I like the idea and everything, but it seems disingenuous to "set blues chords in the left hand to justify the constant tonal shifts from B to b flat in this chess game. The chords modulate from C Major to F Major and finally end in B Flat Major." Not really impressive IMO if the algorithmic compositions can't stand on their own.
I wonder if there is a song out there that could be mapped to a chess game. This would be much more difficult (if not impossible) to find one AND have the moves be legal / in the correct order.
It'd make for a heck of a flash movie though.
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I've thought of this basic idea years ago, but never got anything working. I think a better algorithm can be made by using the "tension" of a game defined by whether something has an "only move" sacrifice or whether it is a simple positional game. Other factors include how threatening or placid a move is.
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I've heard lots of jazz that was far, far worse.
I did a chess game-to-music algorithm for a university class back in 1993. The algorithm itself was written into an AREXX script for Amiga. AREXX was a neat scripting language for the Amiga; many software packages included an AREXX port, which exposed an API to the language, so that AREXX programs could control the software. So I had the script read chess notation from my word processor, parse it, calculate the music, and write the notation to my notation software, where I could print it, play it, change instrumentation, etc. I actually used this type of workflow for several different algorithms. The early ones focused on the moves themselves, and later involved concepts like captures and threats. It was fun, and I got an A in the class, but I don't remember producing anything sublime.
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Seems to me the first thing you'd want is a control game. Convert a game played by two amateurs to music. Or two computers making random legal moves. Do they sound any less listenable?
Or have you just rediscovered basic music theory that random notes in the same key end up sounding like music?
It's pretty clear from listening that it's not following any time pattern; it's got no beat.
These, particularly the second sample (The Opera Game) sound like something Richard D James would do. A certain random, almost generative quality.
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Or is it the program that interpreted the chess game into music? That is, would a bunch of random numbers being fed into the program produce just as good of a sound? Sometimes I wonder about these things.
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This exercise is a waste. We could do a similar exercise with sectors of the lawn your dog chose to piss in and the results would be just as random and useless.
Sometimes I wonder how this stuff makes it onto the main page.
What's being done is starting with a chess game, throwing out most of the information (the positions of non-moving pieces, which piece is moving, and one of the two dimensions of movement), converting (deterministically) what little is left into a sequence of notes, deciding (creatively/non-deterministically) what rhythm to put them in, and deciding (creatively/non-deterministically) how to harmonize them. It's only a mapping between maybe 10% of the game and maybe 20% of the music.
It's a mildly interesting way to "seed" the creative process, but it's neither an impressive intellectual accomplishment (from a musical or mathematical perspective) nor a testament to hidden order in the universe. Most people seem to be misinterpreting it as one (or paradoxically both) of those.
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Joseph Knecht... Magister Ludi... The Glass Bead Game? Music, mathematics, strategy of Chess/Go...
Just sayin'
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Hmmm....
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The idea of using fairly random or non-musical elements in composing music is definitely not a new idea: John Cage famously created a piece using the I Ching as the source of randomness. The thing is, how it sounds depends largely on how you set the parameters you randomize. For instance, if you allow pitch to change because somebody played Qd2, but have all the notes at the same volume, the most noticeable effect will be the relatively constant volume.
And yes, I am a music geek who's even composed a few things this way that came out not half-bad.
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You could probably easily adapt this script that plays random-ish music to get the input from this type of mapping to chess moves, as well. :) (plays directly to /dev/dsp)
http://kmkeen.com/awk-music/
But there was human creativity involved in its production, it was just not aimed at creating music.
and it sounds like heavy meTAL
"Outputted" - seriously? More coffee for the poster methinks. Or a spell check enabled browser.
I don't get it. How exactly is this disrespect? Everybody seems all fired up, but why?
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What they need to do next is to map a companies financial reports to music. That might make some money if the government doesn't buy it out.
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Number of players: 0
Computer chooses: Toccata and Fugue in D minor (white)
Computer chooses: Louie Louie (black)
Start game.
The only winning move is Jam Session.
Next thing you know some lawyer will be running around getting people to reveal what they aren't telling him by playing an elaborate game of mental chess.
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Back in 2009, I did something very similar with one of the 1997 Kasparov vs. Deep Blue games.
One difference is that I used a chess engine, and made the search tree audible, so you can hear the chess computer "thinking". Here's my original blog article: http://www.krazydad.com/blog/2009/05/musical-chess/ and here's video from the concert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42G6P0b72Gk
Reminds me a lot of Magister Ludi (or The Glass Bead Game, depending on which version of the translation you got) by Herman Hesse.
Also, Haskell Small composed a piano duet about a game of Go played by Shusaku vs. Ota Yuzo.
It's on Youtube in two parts:
part 1
part 2
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I wonder if we could flip this concept on this back and turn music into chess games?! .. well i'll be damned
Take a large bunch of existing popular music files , see if anything maps to a logically played chessgame . If anything like that exists
Would the Fool's Mate game sound like "Shave and a Haircut?"
It's called aleatoric music (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music)
When I was an undergrad music major, I created an algorithm to convert games of a particular variant of solitaire to four-part "harmony". It was part of a sophomore theory project. I had to do it all by hand, since it took place in 1980.
The results were un-surprisingly un-listenable.
i was already working on 'audiobrain' for pChess - mapping move scores to pitch, but jon stokes system for mapping square values to note and octave makes too much sense - using Bflat for B, and Bnatural for the H column is just genius, and provides the missing link - i sense a new feature coming to pChess.. :-}
pChess (open source chess application for OS X)
I've been listening to these so long, I don't even hear the music anymore. All I see is pawn, knight, redhead.
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