Hacker News Reader

Comment by maroonblazer | Hacker News Reader

I studied audio engineering and music synthesis in college and accumulated racks of synths. I rarely composed a complete piece of music but rather became consumed with 'sculpting' sound. After graduating I sold all the gear and bought an acoustic guitar and microcassette recorder. Constrained to just voice and guitar I was MUCH more productive.

Perhaps I'm naive or 'old school' but I'm struggling to believe we've exhausted all possibilities of what can be done with just 12 notes (and their octaves) and rhythm subdivided into 32nds or 64ths.

In other words I'm more interested in how ML can help us discover new combinations of notes (melodically and harmonically) and rhythms rather than new kinds of sounds.

View on HN

Even when it comes to electronic music, most of the stunning new sounds we come across are achieved by hacking or tweaking simple systems : over use of compressor, overuse of LFO for dubstep basses, bitcrushing, use of half defective samplers producing slightly out of tune sound, prepared pianos...

With regard to tonality: you might enjoy some microtonal works, traditional turkish music [0], electronic music [1] and many other non-european musical traditions (indian, arab).

For rhythm there's a wide range for experimentation: from really slow tempos [2] to really fast and (seemingly) chaotic [3]. I like this study from Conlon Nancarrow [4], where the tempo between two voices evolve in time in coordination with each other.

So this 'different' music exists, and has existed for a long time in human history, it's just not very popular. E.G. In [1], apart from Wendy Carlos's invented microtonal scales there are some songs that take from other cultures [5] (See how the 7th track is similar to [3] interestingly enough).

And it makes sense for not being popular actually, given how human ears perceive chords as really fast polyrhythms. The simpler the more harmonic they sound. [6]

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxWUgqduqYM

1: https://soundcloud.com/roberto-la-forgia/sets/beauty-in-the-...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEiRKpflgQA

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg1sgrw1PGM (1:50 onwards)

4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2gVhBxwRqg

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_in_the_Beast

6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiNKlhspdKg

I'm with you on this. I'd like to see ML applied to compositions of single artist (MIDI files) to try and emulate his style. Then you could create a blend of Santana and Gilmour. Even better, model should also work in real-time to supplement live performance with virtual band members. Is anybody working on this?

I'm working with on something just like that. IDE : Windows notepad = my thing : normal daws. Sign up here if you want to be notified when it's ready https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-aQzVbkbGwv2BMQsvuoneOUPgyr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com