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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
I don't agree. Instruments output just the sound by input directly or indrectly by humans. An advanced algorithm creating a new Mozart master piece is no different. It has just more layers of abstraction. The so called emotion you refer to is more a personal association with something in your own mind. Memories, experiences etc. Not so much related to the actual physics of music. And from a technical perspective there is theoretically nothing a computer couldnt mimic.
That's exactly wrong. Composers have always included cultural references and emotional trigger patterns in music, and arranged them to create musical metaphors - sometimes just for the expression, sometimes as social commentary.
For example Don Giovanni has quotes from the dance music of the day, and Mozart uses the quotes to highlight the experiences and feelings of the characters - sometimes ironically, sometimes not.
And in the Baroque period there was an established tradition of associating standard compositional patterns with specific emotions. It was diluted in later periods, but it never quite went away.
20th century academic music turned its back on these traditions and made the dogmatic assertion that music is just formal structure with no other content, and more or less any structure will do as long as it's complicated enough to be intellectually interesting.
But it's never been true. Not in classical music, not in academic music, and not even in "simple" pop.
Great points. It's amazing how people seem to want to pay no attention to the whole field of aesthetics when they see a computer make some sounds. Computers can help in composition, of course, but a computer composing by itself is a whole different matter.
I don't see this as a musical instrument anymore then one could consider a metronome an instrument. This is a tool that you can use to experiment with and practice and you don't necessarily need a whole big band to back you while your practicing. This would be extremely useful for things like learning improvisation where its very helpful to have a beat as well as some sort of chordal support.
If you took away the human input, that wouldn't sound anything like the Beatles.
The last I heard, the person responsible for this is now working for Spotify. So I wonder if the plan is to eliminate human composers altogether and create a muzak machine that doesn't need to pay out streaming fees to creators.
I suspect that won't work - except maybe for the most wallpaper-y music genres.
It's the musical equivalent of "not even wrong". It's not just that it lacks a human element, it's aggressively inhuman. It creeps me out like those jerky animatronic characters at Chuck-E-Cheese.
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
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.