WolframTones: Generate a Composition | Hacker News Reader

WolframTones: Generate a Composition

tones.wolfram.com

Wow, this made my day! The Latin and Rock/Pop categories sound like Monkey Island :D

Amazing. Whoever didn't see it yet should watch Stephen Wolfram's talk about computation: http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_...

I tried to watch the video - but I could only make it to the point where he, in-all-seriousness, compared himself to Galileo...

If embedded MIDI isn't working, use

    javascript:window.location = document.getElementById('toneframe').contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName('embed')[0].src

To download the MIDI file directly.

Watch some of Ephidrena's old 4k demos on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6mynON6eQI

(If you have an Amiga lying around you can run the actual demo)

That's multi channel digital audio (+ graphics) in under 4000 bytes. Wolfram sounds like the ROM off a synthesizer back in the early 90's.

It seems to me that it's using Quicktime's midi engine. The focus is not on sound synthesis at all, it's on composition. When you download the composition it's sent to you as a midi file. With that you can easily assign better sounds than the ones provided by Quicktime.

Mind you the Terms of Use are brutal and you're basically not supposed to do anything with that midi file anyways. Pretty much any creative use of it could be considered derivative works.

It would be pretty hard to prove that what you made was a derivative work, especially if you used Tor.

I wonder if Wolfram are going to claim copyright on all tunes that it's possible for this code to generate? ;-)

This is pretty cool but I am a bit disappointed. The classical generator doesn't generate any recognizable genre of classical music that I've ever heard. I managed to get one that sounded like a phase-cycle piece without actually having any phasing.

I'll probably keep an eye on it though.

I first heard about WolframTones on The website of the physicist turned mathematician John Baez. He composed a pretty decent album using WolframTunes called Treq Lila: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/music/treq_lila/

Somewhere Raymond Scott is smiling

"... was an American composer, band leader, pianist, engineer, recording studio maverick, and electronic instrument inventor."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Scott

(also the creator of most music you remember from Warner Bros. cartoons, and inventor of the electronium, a totally analog machine that composed its own tunes, customizable by the "performer")

Here is a simpler aproach in Python. http://blog.devartis.com/2009/09/25/musikalisches-wurfelspie...

Now That's What I Call Music: http://tones.wolfram.com/xid/6785-514-9680-596-5232

I'm pretty sure that's just a real "psytrance" song at half-tempo.

That song sounds like a Xerophonics law suit waiting to happen.

I can't believe this predates WolframAlpha by like four years. This is a bizarre little idea begging to be re-discovered by a larger audience.

My ears are bleedinggggg. Seriously, none of the generated pieces made any musical sense.

They need to work on the rhythm.

I have to install a quicktime plugin? No thanks.

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