Every time someone visits my variation of SonicGarbage, it performs a YouTube search with randomly generated phrases to discover videos. It then downloads these videos, processes their audio, and converts them into a loop. The site then generates a unique timestamped URL hosting each sample loop that was generated and adds it to an archive of random YouTube sample packs.
Since this is running on a free tier Google micro instance it takes close to a minute to run this process. So, when you visit you'll be enjoying a page of samples generated by the last person who visited.
You can trigger and loop the sounds by clicking and hovering over the YouTube IDs, simulating a live sampler. Right-clicking the IDs allows you to download the looped sample files. I didn't bother to optimize for mobile so it's desktop only right now...sorry!
Kudos to Colugo Music for inspiring so many of us!
suggestion: when you click to loop a sound, the URL should update with the current state of everything you have selected. Then you could send the URL to other people and they could listen to your garbage.
Really enjoy playing with this. As others have noted, would find it more usable if the colors indicated source types (but acknowledge the purposeful intent to keep this instrument less predictable for the sake of playfulness).
A bit off-topic, but I might actually find this approach useful for music production, especially if I could just drag and drop a folder of samples into a grid in an M4L plugin.
Very cool - I still find Reich's looping sample experiments inspiring!
To this day I find pretty elemental algorithmic and/or deterministic composition experiments far more inspiring and idiosyncratic than gen AI. There is such a wide gap between gen AI sound generation and the prompter, that the result feels utterly disconnected from the composer's intent.
This is fantastic. Selection of sounds is very interesting. It sets your brain on the quest of transderivational search, traversing his own spaces to find (derive) meaning when hearing these snippets of speech. They are ambiguous enough to really f$Y^k it up a bit, so process unfolds a bit more than usually.
Maybe currently looped squares in one column could not overlap, but that would be needed if this was some mixing table and it is not (it is a bit). It's awesome!
I really would love to hear some back story on why (eg. sounds selection).
Yes, piling up current loops in a column is a good idea - it’s been suggested before but I think that I’m “seeing” it now i.e. how to make the UI for it.
It will be more challenging on mobile but I can make the sticky looping squares smaller. Thanks!
ah nice. I have sonic garbage on offer as well: If y'all need/want some non-traditional didgeridoo samples for toys such as these, do contact me. Whether it's drum sounds (didgeridoo equivalent of: kick, snare, toms, roto-toms), time-insensitive drone loops or percussive molecules/textures, I'm happy to record what you need (yeah, time-boxed naturally if unpaid) for projects such as this one.
Ah that’s really great… I might be able to do that with a keyboard shortcut - hold “4” while clicking a square and then the sample will autoloop but play only 1 times out of 4. I’ll try this!
This is really cool. I played around for a minute or so and ended up with a cute little loop that reminds me of something from Four Tet’s Pink album. It just needs some sort of analogue drum machine underneath with some subtle sidechaining on the kick and it’d be ready for general consumption. So soothing.
I saw that was cool then I realised you could scroll down. Super cool!
One bit of feedback is that as you scroll the boxes can cover each other up so maybe the UI can be tweaked to allow you to stop a sample even if it's might be coloured.
I'd like the samples I've used to show up in a history list on the right.
Are the colours supposed to mean anything? It would be useful to tell at a glance roughly the type of sound I'm going to get (male voice, female voice, instrument, percussion, machine noise, etc)
The colors are random, but I agree with you. I was considering doing some twee basic spectral analysis and using that to inform the colors. I’ll look into it!
Yes the loops are not all exactly the same length so drifting can definitely happen.
There’s another comment here suggesting to fix the looping interval so that all samples will play on a regular bpm, but it does introduce a bit of complexity in terms of how to implement and interact with that different way of looping.
But how would that work with the mouse over event? I.e. I can’t undo that a user is currently hovering over a square. The only thing I see that could be undone is the clicking.
Let me know if I’m missing something and how should undo work. Thanks!
I was inspired by the demo Colugo Music shared over the weekend and made a variation on Sunday and shared a link to it and the code yesterday: https://danielraffel.me/2023/11/21/sonic-garbage/
Demo here: https://polymetallic.co
Every time someone visits my variation of SonicGarbage, it performs a YouTube search with randomly generated phrases to discover videos. It then downloads these videos, processes their audio, and converts them into a loop. The site then generates a unique timestamped URL hosting each sample loop that was generated and adds it to an archive of random YouTube sample packs.
Since this is running on a free tier Google micro instance it takes close to a minute to run this process. So, when you visit you'll be enjoying a page of samples generated by the last person who visited.
You can trigger and loop the sounds by clicking and hovering over the YouTube IDs, simulating a live sampler. Right-clicking the IDs allows you to download the looped sample files. I didn't bother to optimize for mobile so it's desktop only right now...sorry!
Kudos to Colugo Music for inspiring so many of us!