Microscale – turn random Wikipedia articles into music | Hacker News Reader

Microscale – turn random Wikipedia articles into music

alestsurko.by

67 pointsalestsurko25 comments

I love how the results sounds, so I wanted to now how it works.

Very briefly glancing over the code and listening to the audio files in the samples folder:

The six articles correspond two six different voices or "instruments" which are pre-recorded samples of drone like sound and sequences of notes varying in pitch and speed. The letters in the article then trigger play and stop events for the samples according to a mapping.

Example for 'u':

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AlesTsurko/microscale/gh-p...

As the description indicates, there doesn't seem to be any tone generation or modulation going on in the browser.

Exactly. There is a farther explanation in the interview: http://www.preservedsound.com/news/ales-tsurko-microscale-ge...

Great work, fitting everything together so well!

How did you go about deciding on the mapping setting like "shouldPauseEventOnMatch", "isLoop" and "eventLength"? Is there a logic behind it or more testing and listing what works together?

Thanks!

I started with the composition (the music one). So these have been dictated by composition techniques: some samples should play in a loop, others should be played fully before the sequencer's cursor increments etc.

It has been a long-term ambition of mine to someday build an electronic aeolian harp[1], powered by weather data. This, I must say, is an even better idea.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolian_harp

No idea how the text relates to the music, but beautifully haunting none the less.

> Each article functions as a step sequencer, where the letters are the sequencer steps and the track titles are regular expressions that switch the steps on and off.

The mapping is here. [0] (So far as I can tell)

[0] https://github.com/AlesTsurko/microscale/blob/gh-pages/scrip...

...and you can change the mapping file to use it as an instrument for your own music, btw.

Now that's the modularity that really appeals to me. Nicely done.

Is there not a license on this?

I'm not the author, so best direct things their way. But I did open an issue for it. [0]

[0] https://github.com/AlesTsurko/microscale/issues/1

Done. Thanks!

You might be interested in Wikirock, a Finnish group who _also_ turn random Wikipedia articles into music. They're on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3c7rymM4Z143IeZiTJJbQ6

I know we're not supposed to post low-effort comments like "this is lovely", but this is lovely.

Thank you guys! I glad that you liked microscale.

It's a great mix of artistic talent (sampling can be hard), and creative programming (the sequencer is kinda beautiful).

You should be proud.

Thanks!

Is there something to read me a wikipedia article?

Working on it. Send me an email if you want to try an early version.

wikipedia2text | espeak ?

A bit like Anthem in Dirk Gently.

This is superb! The concept is brilliant!

How can I play the articles I choose?

Due to the album's concept there is no such a feature, sorry. But you can fork the project on github and try to set attribute contenteditable to "true" for the div, which you'd like to fill up with your text. The buffers have ids "buffer-1", "buffer-2" etc.

Wow! That sounds fantastic, actually. This is the first case of completely computer-generated music I like listening to.

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