It was written by Laurie Spiegel, a composer and early pioneer in electronic music.
> Music Mouse is an algorithmic musical composition software developed by Laurie Spiegel. The "intelligent instrument" name refers to the program's built-in knowledge of chord and scale convention and stylistic constraints. Automating these processes allows the user to focus on other aspects of the music in real time.
> In addition to improvisations using this software, Spiegel composed several works for "Music Mouse", including Cavis muris in 1986, Three Sonic Spaces in 1989, and Sound Zones in 1990. She continued to update the program through Macintosh OS 9 and, as of 2021, it remained available for purchase or demo download from her website.
Key takeaways from that book are mostly about money:
1) science is expensive
2) having a gigantic hose of money helps
3) scientists should not be the same people acquiring and managing money and programs
Very disappointing that our current academic science system operates with almost an identically opposite model to Bell labs.
Wow, this is probably the most intuitively enjoyable music tool I've ever used.
I'm not a musician and I know very little about what makes music good, but playing with this tool felt like I was hearing a better version of my own imagination. Like those scenes in movies where people can suddenly play music and have no idea how they're doing it.
PG Music's Band-in-a-Box still exists, but way back in the Windows 3.1 era it already had a "snap to pleasant notes" feature if you wanted to play along a set of chords on a MIDI piano. It could also play chords in the style of famous musicians along with your never-ever-bad notes! I always switched it to the "Erroll Garner" preset and hammered away.
That's the magic of music theory: it constraints the space of all possible invocations of an instrument to those that are theoretically correct. Our 'random input' is fit upon the closest match that yields a music-theoretical correct outcome.
Western music has certain "rules" that our ears are used to. If the computer limits variation/random-ness to stay within those rules, it will sound at least "pleasant", as the bot won't let you drive outside the lines. However, the real artistry is knowing when and where to break the rules. A tune that sticks to all the rules risks sounding stale or ordinary. You gotta know where to spice and spike it to move to the next level.
By total chance, this revealed a flaw with my mouse that's been haunting me for months.
My right mouse button intermittently doesn't bring up context menus, which I seemingly confirmed by recording the screen and visualizing click events in a presentation mode. It would show what looked like one right click, but no context menu, or a context menu that appeared and was immediately dismissed.
But this revealed that it's actually rapidly sending multiple logical clicks per physical click. The logical clicks are fast enough that the screen recordings didn't differentiate them as separate events - which sent me in the wrong direction, making me think the OS was disregarding clicks. But here, the multiple clicks are clearly audible.
I've had this problem on so many mice over the years, going back to the Amiga days. Often it can be fixed by opening the mouse and gluing a tiny bit of thin card to the nub which presses on the microswitch. (Usually the problem is just that the plastic has worn down over the years and no longer pushes the button quite far enough to make a clean contact.)
I've fixed some of mine by opening the switches themselves and bending the metal spring a bit. Of course that only lasts for so long before you need to re-do the fix.
The middle mouse button seems to be the one to fail the most - I guess manufacturers cheap out on it even more than others since it isn't used by normal people that don't use X11 (middle click paste for selections) or know that it opens links in new tabs (in FF at least).
> This is one more example of perfectly good theory not getting used in practice to save pennies per unit and also to perpetuate planned obsolescence. That is, sales would drop if you no longer needed a new mouse every two to four years as a result of glitchy buttons.
FWIW, the [1]Zaunkoenig brand is where I first heard about this. I have their M1K and M2K mice, which are really nice. (I am otherwise unaffiliated with them)
As a person with no knowledge of music theory, I am amazed how the music produced here, even with completely random mouse movements, still sounds decent—even a bit pleasing, if I may. Certainly better than hitting keys randomly on a piano as an amateur. How does that happen? Is it just about the tempo, and how space between two notes has been programmatically defined?
Music theory is an amazing subject. You can actually make random notes sound reasonably musical by constraining them to just a few simple rules. Copy/pasting from Dmitri Tymoczko's Music 105 lecture notes:
1. Conjunct melodic motion. Melodies tend to move by short distances from note to note. Large leaps sound inherently unmelodic.
2. Harmonic consistency. The chords in a passage of music, whatever they may be, tend to be structurally similar to one another.
3. Acoustic consonance. Some chords sound intrinsically good or pleasing. These are said to be consonant.
4. Scales. Over small spans of musical time (say 30 seconds or so), most musical styles tend to use just a few types of notes, between 5 to 8.
5. Centricity. Over moderate spans of musical time, one tonic note is heard as being more prominent than the others, appearing more frequently and serving as a goal of musical motion.
(Not to say that everything that sounds musical follows these rules, just that if you follow these rules the output is likely to sound musical.)
It does keep the tempo, but also limits you to a single scale. So it does sound nice for a bit, but the song doesn't really go anywhere. There are some physical instruments that typically limit you to a single scale too, like a harmonica.
You don't need modulation (going to more than one scale/key) for the song to "go somewhere" or be hella interesting, catchy and touching/emotional.
Tens of thousands of the most known rock and pop songs and hits, from rockers to tearful ballads, are single scale diatonic as well.
You don't even need off-scale passing notes...
The reason this doesn't go anywhere, is not because it's single-scale, but because the melody has no direction and purpose. It's just a "random" pick based on the mouse movements.
Nice! One problem: There's digital clipping. I suspect that the four samples are normalized individually, and when playing at the same time the transients add up to over 0dB. On quality headphones (beyerdynamic dt770 for me) it is quite audible. It happens with the piano and the synth sample, but is more audible with the piano sample.
Is that the sort of "scratch" or "crunch" I hear from my Sennheiser HD 4.50's or is it something else?
At first, I didn't even notice it, but now I went back to listen more carefully. I'm not sure if my headphones are "quality" or not but they are the most expensive set I've ever owned.
I hear no clipping (like sudden silence) at the end of notes, even if I wait a long time. But, my ears are not tuned.
Additive digital clipping would be happening in your device. You should be able to resolve it by turning your OS volume down. This website could use a volume slider for each voice, though.
As the world's most Curmudgeonly and Grumpy Old Man (TM) when it comes to web-based music applications ... THIS IS AMAZING. If I wasn't busy, I'd be implementing a native version of this right now. I know some of Laurie Spiegel's music, but had no idea she had ever designed anything like this. Just amazing.
No matter where I move my cursor, it ends up sounding like an opening theme for a light-hearted anime series. Impressed at how melodic it sounds even though I don't know what I'm doing.
Also please fix the mouse jacking. I was only able to regain control of my mouse after exiting the tab :(
I played with the original a long time ago. IIRC, back then Laurie Spiegel asked for some kind of credit on music that was generated by it given that the musical output would be bounded by the software design.
Also, if you've never heard her album Unseen Worlds, its definitly worth checking out.
I had low expectations for this when I clicked the link and saw the spinny-rotatey loading ring (which for informational sites usually portends a wasted journey) - but I have to say this is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time! I think an FPGA-based implementation of this or something similar might end up on my projects list in the not too distant future...
It does produce quite nice-sounding fragments from random mouse moves. It highlights how much of the actual music composition process is just plain math, which is done by the algorithm in this case.
With a mouse pressing and holding left/center/right mouse buttons and moving the mouse result in no sound until the left/center/right button is released. Not knowing about touchpads, do they not have buttons for left/center/right? If they do maybe those will work as they do on a mouse?
Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629172536fw_/http://retiary... (Archived because the original site is quite slow: http://retiary.org/ls/programs.html)
It was written by Laurie Spiegel, a composer and early pioneer in electronic music.
> Music Mouse is an algorithmic musical composition software developed by Laurie Spiegel. The "intelligent instrument" name refers to the program's built-in knowledge of chord and scale convention and stylistic constraints. Automating these processes allows the user to focus on other aspects of the music in real time.
> In addition to improvisations using this software, Spiegel composed several works for "Music Mouse", including Cavis muris in 1986, Three Sonic Spaces in 1989, and Sound Zones in 1990. She continued to update the program through Macintosh OS 9 and, as of 2021, it remained available for purchase or demo download from her website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Spiegel
She was featured in the documentary, Sisters with Transistors. https://sisterswithtransistors.com/