
WolframTones – An Experiment in a New Kind of Music (2005) - weatherlight
http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/G16aF5KBayLGZqrbyXodKZNu6fmG6ANllrjanSNAPM
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mimixco
The music is just awful. Try the Dance or Hip-Hop buttons and tell me you hear
anything but 8-bit videogame music, not even remotely in the genre.

I love music and software and I play the synth myself (a Roland V-Synth with
normal piano keys), but I don't see how experiments like this actually
accomplish anything. People create music and art. Machines don't. And I don't
they ever really will, frankly, because machines lack the emotional impetus or
understanding to make art that's meaningful to people.

~~~
munificent
A human choosing to use a machine to automatically generate music is still a
human choice that communicates something to other humans. It may not
communicate an idea or feeling that resonates with you personally, but it's
definitely saying something.

One of the fundamental changes in humanity especially in the recent past is
machines. Of course artists are going to explore that relationship. Part of
that exploration may be things you don't like. Maybe that's deliberate. Maybe
the artist wants you to feel uncomfortable with the mechanization of our life.

Personally, I've been on a kick recently of listening to "synth jams" on
YouTube. Musicians set up a big pile of drum machines, synths, effects, and
argpeggiators and then play live sprawling evolving soundscapes. The result is
a mixture of human choice and machine-like repetition, and it really does it
for me. Plus all the blinking lights are pretty.

~~~
Frondo
I gave it a go and listened to a bunch of these wolframtunes....all of which
sounded very much like random walking melodies over rhythm tracks someone
probably programmed, or specified with enough constraints that they sounded
like a regular 4/4 rhythm. (I didn't fuck with the controls too much.)

I can accept your statement that "it's definitely saying something," with the
caveat that all that random walking melodies are saying is: "I programmed a
computer to generate a random melody."

The range of expression is limited when you're making a computer work on
random input; it's pretty much limited to "this is a demonstration of the
algorithm I programmed," kind of a far cry from how most music is written and
received.

Synth jams are something else, they're driven by people through and through.

~~~
munificent
_> I gave it a go and listened to a bunch of these wolframtunes_

Sure, but that just says that _this particular_ combination of human and
machine isn't very good. Lots of people play guitar poorly. That doesn't imply
that guitars are bad instruments.

 _> it's pretty much limited to "this is a demonstration of the algorithm I
programmed," kind of a far cry from how most music is written and received._

If I write an "algorithm" that simply plays back a hard-coded series of notes
and timing that I selected, that's, I assume you would agree, a fully artistic
expression. After all, that's how most working keyboard musicians work today.
They play and record the MIDI notes. Now maybe I play a few melodies and write
a program that just randomly selects between them. That's still 90% human-
authored "art" plus a little random chance. Maybe the melodies get shorter and
the random choices get larger. There is a continuum here between "human makes
all decisions" and "human makes no decisions" and I think you'd have a really
hard time putting a finger on it saying "everything below here is just
algorithmic demonstrations".

Even acoustic instruments and our physical bodies have some stochastic
processes. A tambourine player isn't controlling the hit timing of each
individual cymbal on it. That doesn't lessen it. Maximum artistic value
doesn't necessarily mean "maximum human intent".

See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_(music)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_\(music\))

 _> they're driven by people through and through._

I think you might be surprised. Many synths and drum machines have randomness
as an input and can use it to vary the timbre of sounds, velocity, whether or
not to play individual drum hits, etc. For example, the Digitone lets you
assign probabilities to individual notes and will roll the dice each time to
decide whether or not to play it.

Even hand-authored LFOs with slow rates interact in ways the author is
unlikely to be choosing deliberately. It's not like musicians are calculating
the least common multiple of their various LFO frequencies to determine when
the pattern repeats. They just tweak a few knobs and let them "randomly"
wander in and out of phase with each other.

------
mturmon
Meanwhile, in the world where generative music is made with the obvious
involvement of actual musicians:
[http://www.generativemusic.com](http://www.generativemusic.com)

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sova
As a musician, Every sound I have tried is terrifying to the core. Well done.
This is necessary like a new kind of Sleep. Actually, the Hip Hop button
generated something almost palatable. All jesting aside, this is actually
quite interesting, as it lead me to see the Elementary Introduction to
programming with Sound in the Wolfram language. Some inflexible points of
implementation: notes are represented by names and numbered pitches, like "C"
and 5. This is interesting for Western music that enjoys the twelve-tone scale
and chordal motion, but for generative computer music as long as we appreciate
the natural harmonic string lengths we will have harmony: 3:2 and 4:3
representing relative ratios between pitches. Choosing static points on the
spectrum and adding music programmatically is the perfect way to ignore
everything that makes music musical, the relative ratio of frequencies

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benguild
I remember thinking this was terrible when it came out.

