Show HN: Kizina – Self-Executing, Interactive Music Album Technology | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kizina – Self-Executing, Interactive Music Album Technology

github.com

38 pointsnfixx24 comments

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...

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 and anything by YM Rockerz, who can do any style of music on an Atari ST: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56810

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.

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...

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

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.

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

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

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

It's not an entirely new art form. The demoscene [0] has been going strong far longer than most of us have even been coding. So apparently some people _will_ execute interactive art.

Also, you can still listen to their music on soundcloud [1] if you don't want to review the code. It's open source after all, which can't be said for most demos...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene -- Check this video for a neat example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AUpZNq2vSQ

[1] https://soundcloud.com/nemesis-fixx/

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.

> 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.

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.

Well, that's what Mr.Robot taught us

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.

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 - various founders and employees of RjDj can be found at: https://enzienaudio.com/ http://reactifymusic.com/ http://www.mogees.co.uk/ http://hearapp.io/

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

- 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 ;)

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?

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.

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

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

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 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).

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 2 - https://archive.org/details/sting-all-this-time-interactive-... 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSdI7HEn6EU

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 ;-)

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.

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