There's a nice website with a clean UI called 'Music for programming', put together by a guy who curates playlists designed to compliment anyone who wants to buckle down and do deep focus creative work for a while. I've been through each of his 53 playlists several times. 'Asiatsana' is one track in one playlist, but the music overall is very much in keeping with the mood and tone of Asiatsana.<p><a href="https://musicforprogramming.net/?fortyfive" rel="nofollow">https://musicforprogramming.net/?fortyfive</a>
For musicians and devs, it's a good hint that Markov chains are "good enough" for most interesting music applications, ML/AI doesn't typically yield better results. Happy to see this on the front page!
On a side note, saw a nice write-up celebrating the recent 25th anniversary of Selected Ambient Works Volume II:<p><a href="https://www.residentadvisor.net/reviews/23648" rel="nofollow">https://www.residentadvisor.net/reviews/23648</a><p>I feel like that album has a lot of potential for generative experiments. Admittedly, the album has an over-arching tone of eeriness throughout, which isn't something I want to listen to while I work most days. Maybe it would be inspiring to game developers working in the horror genre :)
If you guys enjoy generative music, you should try Sunvox.<p>The author has created a js library which you can use to play .sunvox files in it, it is pretty nice too.<p><a href="http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/jsplay/" rel="nofollow">http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/jsplay/</a><p>try 'machine 005'. I've been using it for coding lately.
Thanks for writing this and spending the time to break down and explain how you did it.<p>I’m not the biggest apex twin fan, but I’ve followed him for a few decades and always liked his visual and audio tricks mixed into his music. I feel like he would enjoy the idea of an infinite track and hope he responds somehow.<p>Are there any file formats that allow generative music so I can download this and play in a non-internet connected situation?
In knowing the original track very well, I find this version fascinating but also frustrating to listen to. It really emphasizes for me the importance of well thought out note placement and timing and the connection throughout, especially in minimalist pieces. This might sound pompous, but it's like the original seeks to tell a story, but this version is like pulling words and phrases out of a hat; the emotional payoff doesn't exist for me. I hope that's not discouraging in any way, as I think this type of experimentation should be celebrated and the writeup is excellent. I'm only speaking of what effect this has on me tied to this particular piece of music.
Doom from 2016 had this really cool feature in it where the music was procedurally adaptive based on the context of the game. When you were getting into a battle the music would mutate and become a lot more aggressive. Small fights would be different from big hairy fights. Ending a fight on low health would be different from leaving it unscathed.<p>For long time I've always thought it would be great to have something that had a similar effect based on text input speed.<p>Situations like getting into a massive battle, or leaving a battle with low health would have the music mutate to
Generative music comes full circle. This side of Aphex Twin is more or less directly inspired by Brian Eno's Music for Aiports. Which itself comes out of Eno's generative music experiments.
Although I like the result, I find the track less soothing without the birds in the background. There's probably a way to generate those as well though, I suppose.
Reminds me of the Infinite Jukebox: <a href="http://infinitejukebox.playlistmachinery.com/" rel="nofollow">http://infinitejukebox.playlistmachinery.com/</a>
There are a number of languages / environments to help with the creation of generative music under the umbrella term 'live coding' - the community also tries to keep the performance aspects of music intact.<p>Lots of great starting points at:
<a href="https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/toplap/awesome-livecoding</a>
As if aisatsana was not beautiful enough, it was first performed in London's Barbican Centre in 2012, on a suspended grand piano, swinging in the air !<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJHsT8kEyzs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJHsT8kEyzs</a>
Generative.fm was shared here last week, spawning a number of interesting discussions. If you enjoy the comments here, I suggest checking out that thread.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19397817" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19397817</a>
I find that perfectly quantized tracks sound artificial over time. Not sure how close “aisatsana” sticks to perfectly on-(half)-beat, but adding slightly random quantization offsets to each generated note could be interesting to lend the results a more "natural" sound
Nice! Simple, but works out super nicely :) Even the occasional odd note doesn't seem too out of place, since the phrases are short and "self-contained".<p>I also enjoyed the rest of the pieces on generative.fm, they all have a specific "character" which is quite rare. Nice work!
Just pop it into paul stretch and convert it into an hour long masterpiece. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1saQ7KLbDUY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1saQ7KLbDUY</a>
This seems very similar to what the Infinite Jukebox does. Granted, it uses the straight audio, so it's more well suited to pop music. But here's the link for this track: <a href="http://infinitejukebox.playlistmachinery.com/?trid=TRIMVDB14AFE744C52" rel="nofollow">http://infinitejukebox.playlistmachinery.com/?trid=TRIMVDB14...</a>
Not generative, but of interest if you like that: <a href="http://musicforprogramming.net/" rel="nofollow">http://musicforprogramming.net/</a>
This is excellent. Thank you so much for sharing (and it's certainly a track that I've also wished was longer!) I'd be interested to see if this approach can be implemented within a DAW? This would allow the notes to be played and then treated with FX, EQ and mastering (or maybe just some sound design to get it sounding even closer to the original)? At a push, one could run the output of the browser through the DAW I suppose :)
Reminds me of this Bandcamp user makes some really cool Sci-Fi ambient loops, this one is a Blade Runner ambient loop: <a href="https://cheesynirvosa.bandcamp.com/track/blade-runner-ambient-deckards-apartment-sound-also-in-the-movie-alien" rel="nofollow">https://cheesynirvosa.bandcamp.com/track/blade-runner-ambien...</a><p>I think something like this would be awesome in generative.
As an aside, if you like the track discussed in the article, check out Brian Eno's ambient work [1].<p>This track is a very obvious homage to Eno (and that's great).<p>Coincidentally, Eno and Richard James are both into generative music and I have little doubt they'll be taking a peek at this article.<p>1. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TSJbT_NWUY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TSJbT_NWUY</a>
One tactic to roll your own is time-stretching. A useful and fun algo (since tamed in 1999) is the phase vocoder. Especially nice for instruments with rich spectrums.<p>Example work (1986) Wishart's <i>Vox 5</i>. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y23kobWHs8M" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y23kobWHs8M</a>
This piece reminds me of Harold Budd's album "The Pearl" (1984)! Which is 42 minutes long - so another way to approach the same problem :) <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/5SSf6lNbSoaAUx6PxQVjlP" rel="nofollow">https://open.spotify.com/album/5SSf6lNbSoaAUx6PxQVjlP</a>
I always think a bit of drum and bass will start playing at any moment listening to this[0]. Aphex Twin's music is so random at times<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_MRe3JwFc8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_MRe3JwFc8</a>
What is a good way to go about working with a new JS library? I only have used Python, Java, and C#. All the tutorials I find on tone.js just include the js code but not information on how to link the library.<p>I would like to play around but getting the dev environment has stumped me.
That's so awesome. It'd be nice to have the bird noises in the background as well though I guess this would be tricky if it's using MIDI to play the music.<p>I guess I could find some ambient bird noise track and play it alongside...
Now do "Flutter"<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZFmZ0gZNZI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZFmZ0gZNZI</a>
Has this guy never heard of a bar or measure? Reading through the first section where he describes the song as sections of 16 <i></i>beats<i></i> makes me cringe, and this is coming from someone admittedly horrible with music theory.<p>Edit: I was turned off by his constant usage of the word “beats”, not phrase.