
Show HN: Kizina – Self-Executing, Interactive Music Album Technology - nfixx
https://github.com/NuChwezi/KIZINA
======
skrebbel
The demoscene has a rich tradition of executable music albums, badly termed
"musicdisks", with various levels of visualizations and interactivity. This
stuff has been going on for decades so I'm not sure about that "world's first"
nomer. But musicdisks are cool, and so is this one! Consider adding it to
pouet.net :-)

Here's a selection of a bit over 3000 musicdisks.
[http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B0%5D=musicdisk&page...](http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B0%5D=musicdisk&page=1&order=thumbup)

Many in there are pretty cool!

Some personal favourites are Kooitriplex by the Serbian art group Kosmoplivci
(made back when Flash was cool, please cut them some slack):
[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=10734](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=10734)
and anything by YM Rockerz, who can do _any_ style of music on an Atari ST:
[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56810](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56810)

~~~
userbinator
I saw "world's first" in the title, immediately thought of demoscene
musicdisks, and was expecting something about the _real_ "world's first"
musicdisk...

Then again, the demoscene isn't really well-known amongst the general public
so I'm not surprised someone else reinvents the same idea.

------
RossBencina
Not sure about "world's first." Here's an album released on Raspberry-Pi Zero
from a couple of months back:

"Musician Releases Album as a Live Coding Device on a Raspberry Pi Zero"
[https://blog.hackster.io/musician-releases-album-as-a-
live-c...](https://blog.hackster.io/musician-releases-album-as-a-live-coding-
device-on-a-raspberry-pi-zero-1474924f5fb7#.9rvekf11q)

~~~
stephencanon
See also the completely-in-hardware "1-bit symphony"
([http://www.1bitsymphony.com/](http://www.1bitsymphony.com/)) and innumerable
other projects.

------
kixpanganiban
Novel, but terrible. The reason why the iPod, then iTunes, and now Spotify has
gained so much traction is EXACTLY because they let you store all your music
together in one place. I can't, for the love of me, imagine wanting to
download an app for every album of every artist I follow. "This is the future
of music!" the Github readme boldly claims. Sorry, but I beg to disagree.

------
visarga
So, the music is locked into a dedicated player which could potentially also
spread viruses while at it?

And for each album, the music player is duplicated?

~~~
paulasmuth
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene)

BTW I do actually enjoy the linked music (allthough I have to admit I'm
listening on soundcloud)!

------
welder
This is a great way to prevent people from hearing your music... nobody wants
to trust your "Album" app to not contain a virus.

~~~
notahacker
Why would an application that was a music album be any more likely to be a
virus than any other piece of software?

I'd have thought the bigger obstacle to people hearing your music is that
people tend to prefer to listen to music in their music player of choice, in
their own playlists or on shuffle. Then again, maybe creative control over how
the songs that compose the album are listened to is part of the app's raison
d'etre.

~~~
gravypod
> Why would an application that was a music album be any more likely to be a
> virus than any other piece of software?

That's not the concern here. How many applications do you have installed?
Maybe 10-20 things for the average user. That's pushing it really now as most
things are in browser.

Now given that, how many music albums do you own? 10, 20, 30? It's not
uncommon to see people who have in the 100s (at least in college).

If you need to install something for every one of those albums that's a much
harder space to audit then 1 music player.

~~~
notahacker
I don't think it's unusual for people to have more apps than music albums
installed on a particular device, and people that audit them in any great
detail are very much in the minority. I'd be surprised if the average person
could even detail the differences in security implications between downloading
an mp4 music video or downloading an executable application purporting to be a
music video from the website of a band they like.

It's not exactly as if good old-fashioned music CDs never installed rootkits
on users' computers either.

------
caseymarquis
As someone who hadn't heard about the demoscene, it still doesn't seem that
ground breaking. Basically sounds like an online game centered around music.
Making a hackable mmo that does just that would be pretty cool. Still neat
though!

As a side note, I'd like to disrupt the use of the word disrupt.

------
jarmitage
From the README:

"I have already tried SoundCloud, I have created a website, I have uploaded
lyrics to Genius, and have even had some traction talking to the good nerds at
HN. But, as a tinkerer, I still wasn't satisfied. This album is by essence a
big challenge to the status quo..."

I can see how you might think you've created a "world's first" if your concept
of music distribution is SoundCloud, websites and Genius. But I think you
would very much enjoy learning how wrong you are in this case, since there is
a huge world of generative / procedural / computer / algorithmic waiting for
you. Here are some random points of interest:

\- RjDj, 2008, iOS App,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RjDj](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RjDj) \-
various founders and employees of RjDj can be found at:
[https://enzienaudio.com/](https://enzienaudio.com/)
[http://reactifymusic.com/](http://reactifymusic.com/)
[http://www.mogees.co.uk/](http://www.mogees.co.uk/)
[http://hearapp.io/](http://hearapp.io/)

\- Some books: Sonic Interaction Design [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sonic-
interaction-design](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/sonic-interaction-design),
The Sonification Handbook (free!)
[http://sonification.de/handbook/](http://sonification.de/handbook/),
Designing Sound (look for the author's procedural audio lectures on YT)
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/designing-
sound](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/designing-sound)

\- [http://toplap.org](http://toplap.org) \- lots of free software projects
for making live music and visuals with code (plus loads of artists in this
community have been releasing interactive music for decades ;)

------
pmontra
I sympathize with the experiment but if one of the goals is to provide

> Albums that just aren't files rotting away on a CD, or DVD,

This is going to rot as an Android app instead, probably much faster than any
CD or DVD. How long is the author planning to maintain the app?

~~~
boomlinde
Better make these things for stale platforms. Goto80 just released dubcrt, a
self executing, "fully interactive" album for the C64--a platform unlikely to
make an app-breaking change anytime soon. IMO this is a great example of what
this thing claimed to do first, too.

------
kowdermeister
So is there a YouTube link to actually listen to what it sounds like? :)

------
madmax96
So instead of music being on a platform, music is the platform?

~~~
nfixx
Sure. In some respects, that's the essence of this. Music that's meant to be
"listenable" independent of other platforms but the "album".

------
nfixx
Nfixx here.

Interesting commentary; some heated, but most informative nevertheless. Yes,
like @caseymarquis, I hadn't heard of Demoscene despite being someone who kind
of hoards all kinds of music (yes, I've even collected some algo-generated
music as many folks do refer to that more modern trend here). But, in my part
of the world - I'm doing these projects from East Africa, there's a lot that
could use some innovation.

I definitely know there are more optimal means for my music to reach fans -
and I'm being vigilant here (see how much channels I've tried thus far). This
is my first serious music project in all of my life thus far, and being a
techy, I always felt there should be a means to do something else besides
suffering at the hands of tradition - I've not yet been successful with
getting someone to manage or help sell my music. So I've decided to do
whatever with it, as I see what ideas work, what doesn't.

Contrary to what one person said, I don't love locking my users/fans in. I
just like to advocate for diversity - and looking at how many options a new
musician has to use for distribution, I felt like, why not use all that I can
readily use at the moment - especially sites/platforms that are more self-
service, and have something new to bring to music distribution:

Genius: I love it, because, a potential fan gets to listen to your music while
studying the lyrics and possibly seeing how others have interpreted what you
have to say. This sort of method of consuming music, in my opinion, is the
"higher end". It is more important than most other methods, especially for
genres such as Hip Hop that I do, where so much effort goes into writing not
just nice-sounding, but educative, often poetic lyrics, and this can best be
appreciated when someone listens as they read the lyrics as well.

\-- so in a way, despite being an official editor on Genius myself, I used
their sleek idea to do something else my folks in this part of the world might
love : my typical local fan here in East Africa might not have the resources
to savor my music album via Genius/Soundcloud all the time, and yet, the idea
of giving them something more than just typical audio/video, seemed to me like
a nice thing - if packaged as an app, not only do they get to listen to the
music, but there's more exciting things they can do with the album even while
offline: read lyrics, take notes, browse longer album bio/stories (which can
all be part of the package, and which, due to the dynamic nature of the app-
medium, allow for more creative ways of presenting many things than a standard
album on disc)

SoundCloud - the possibility of my fans highlighting specific parts of songs
that they liked the most, and possibly leaving context-aware comments for why.
I see Soundcloud giving to the lyricist in me, the equivalent of Genius's per-
line annotation power, but instead, the focus being on the lyrics and
soundscape, as they are combined, at a given moment during the song. DVDs and
most other means of distributing music don't readily given the artiste this
sort of power. \-- and, who says some future version of this KIZINA tech might
not allow "album-app" authors to bake-in perhaps soundcloud-api-powered
discussions for the tracks or offer something similar that uses the internal
streams, but posts to the remote soundcloud (or does a sync of those comments,
and renders them in sync to the user playing the song in the album?) There's
lots of room for innovation and experiment here, and I think this does all of
us more good in the long run, than not. I for one, love to tinker with things
that seem to be important to what I'm doing with my life, and music is one of
them.

So, what might be the real benefits of KIZINA? \- fans can choose to download
the self-contained album app once they really want to be that engaged with
your music (think of a fan that wants to unplug from the internet, but yet go
on that hike with your lyrics, music, album gallery, stories, etc. They can
spend more time engaged with experiencing your music, than what the typical
audio-only or video-only methods of consuming music would offer). And this
doesn't only have to work for music albums only. \- I've already hinted at the
possibility of many educational projects that might use this sort of thing:
story-books, magazines that bundle both music and visual/text, etc. \- The
lure of this all, being the creative power the content author has, when
determining what other auxiliary things to include besides their main product
(in the case of music, the main product being audio). This is an app, so you
might even bundle a game that lets the user play as they listen to your music!
No existing music packaging tech might easily give you that sort of power IMO.

So, TL;DR: This is not as fringe/cutting-edge as I first thought, but it is
nevertheless meant to address some concerns about music (and generally,
content) publishing that I don't see other platforms offering me yet. And it
also sort of opens up innovation, as making albums software, means we can do
an infinity of things with each new music release... Think about that. So,
perhaps KIZINA is still relevant to introduce to the public, as many, like me,
didn't know of other similar options.

I will definitely even consider selling my music directly on the street (it's
one of the more popular methods of indie distribution in Kampala - some bunch
of chaps basically duplicate the records, and vend them on the verandas of
shops and in kiosks of all sorts).

~~~
bane
Old-skool demoscener here, I applaud this effort because it's both an attempt
at adding "more" to the music and because it also shows that sometimes
interesting ideas end up getting developed multiple times. When I was a kid
there used to be these videos [1] that just crammed interesting computer
generated graphics in with a custom sound track -- the one I'm linking to here
had music composed by Thomas Dolby for example.

True, the demoscene produced lots of this kind of stuff also, but with as many
different purposes and goals as similarities. I don't think of your effort or
the video I linked to as being demoscene because they don't share the same
ethos. Sting [2], and other big pop stars [3] played around with this kind of
audio-video (sometimes interactive) stuff when people thought multimedia meant
"CD-ROM" and FMV.

I think your effort here sits very comfortably in the context of these kinds
of audio-visual efforts. Nicely done!

1 -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KWyXopLxac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KWyXopLxac)
2 - [https://archive.org/details/sting-all-this-time-
interactive-...](https://archive.org/details/sting-all-this-time-interactive-
cdrom) 3 -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSdI7HEn6EU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSdI7HEn6EU)

~~~
nfixx
Thanks for sharing this, and especially from the bespoke demoscene community!
Sure, I now realize this concept in its most general form isn't that novel,
and perhaps isn't as phenomenal, but, my motivations warranted it, and well,
those fans of mine who've tried the new album packaging really seem to love it
over the conventional package - audio/video.

I'll just keep it around, and perhaps tweak things as long as there's some
passion for hacking on this some more or if it turns out to be that good for
my fans...

Otherwise, thanks for that background you gave, and the interesting links!
Discovering ideas you resonate with isn't easy either ;-)

~~~
bane
Sure! I'd say even to keep it up. Release the music separately as well, but
these kinds of more sensory productions can be useful to keep fans and to get
new ones. You could end up known as the artist the releases as apps as well as
normal albums.

There's also no need anymore to frame releases as albums to be honest, that's
a by product of the distribution medium. Just make what you like and resonates
with the kind of fans you want and enjoy being creative.

