
WolframTones: An Experiment in a New Kind of Music - solipsist
http://tones.wolfram.com/
======
SwellJoe
This is surprisingly awful, in nearly every dimension. The melodies are
approximately random within a given scale, the harmonies are aimless, and the
instruments are the cheesiest I've heard in over a decade. There have been
_numerous_ algorithmic and automatic and learning composers over the years
that are better than this, at least from an aesthetic perspective, or at least
on par.

It's a hard problem, but I honestly expected something much more interesting
from Wolfram. At the very least someone making something like this ought to
make an effort to understand the current state of the art in the field.

~~~
lurker14
> someone making something like this ought to make an effort to understand the
> current state of the art in the field.

Are you surprised? That's precisely the same criticism Wolfram received when
he first published ANKOS:
<http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html>

------
wickedchicken
No doubt this is on the front page because of the previous generative music
application posted not long ago on HN. I'll make the same comment here as I
did there (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2455023>), namely WolframTones
tries too hard to emulate human-generated music and ends up sounding awful
instead. There is an interesting argument to be made that 'art' attempted to
be understood from an analytic viewpoint ("what is the automaton that creates
jazz?") loses its meaning while extracting art _from_ mathematics ("I wonder
what a random automaton sounds like?") tends to have very interesting results.
It seems to be a one-way operation.

------
btipling
Doesn't seem to work for me on Chrome on Mac OS X. I have flashblock but I
disabled. According to the FAQ it uses quicktime. I think I might have that
disabled.

~~~
cleverjake
works fine for me. You need to enable quicktime to run on the site though. it
does not by default now.

------
bentruyman
Best MIDI generator I've ever used.

