Piano Genie: An Intelligent Musical Interface
magenta.tensorflow.org
magenta.tensorflow.org
I think part of my disatisfaction is due to pattern recognition. As humans we recognize patterns EVERYWHERE, even when they don't exist. So what happens (or what I believe might be happening) is that I think I recognize a pattern, try to play a note to continue it, then the NN decides otherwise. Although the resulting sound may be nice to an outsider it breaks my internal model, making it sound "bad" to me.
I do however like the idea of augmenting insturments to make them easier to play, I'm personally guitly of having many potential songs in my head but not having near enough the skill to execute them.
Makes sense, really, since music can convey much more than is evident merely by looking at the sequence of notes.
Yeah, we've been doing that for a while with music tech starting from basic sequencers, arpeggiators and looper pedals, down to programmable automatic accompaniment on keyboard workstations (you press a chord -- or even one or two keys -- and the virtual band is playing the backing track in the right key).
Anyway, for your problem of having songs in your head: hum them into a portable recorder (cell phone/whatever) whenever you have an idea. At home, try to pick up the melody on an instrument that you can play. With software, record the melody to a click track/metronome. If you can figure out the chords, layer them on top. There are plenty of drum loops lying around. Boom! You've transformed an idea into something others can listen.
IIRC that's how Michael Jackson composed. And if you can't play an instrument, you can hum to a friend who can play, and figure out things together. It really works!
While I could get a bit of a feel for how my actions would influence the piano, there is still a huge disconnect in there. Even something like trying to repeat a note can happen in three different ways (same key, key above, or key below) and there is no indication of which way will work this time.
So improvisation is limited to
- play high or play low
- change tempo
- learn what the machine will do in a situation and try to preempt it; "previously when I pressed these buttons in this order it did a thing, maybe if I do it again it will do a similar thing"
Improvisation isn't just randomly hitting notes, it's connecting different pieces together in new ways. If I play some random notes and I like them, I want to play them again.
Right now there is no way to craft music with this, just different ways to poke the machine to see what kind of music gift it gives you. I want to craft music with this, but I've no idea what that bridge would look like.
Most of what makes good music good (or interesting music interesting if you'd prefer) comes from harmonic interplay and shift. Bach was a master of this. If you listen to the unaccompanied 'cello suites[1] then what makes the music so fascinating is that even though only one note is being played at a time, the harmonic landscape is shifting and changing (often in 'unexpected' ways) all the time.
Doing this with algorithms and making it sound good is hard, and nobody's (afaik) done it well yet.
The demo is definitely not limited in this way, though it may be the case in the physical version in the video.
It feels like the proverb 'too many cooks spoil the broth', i.e. both me and the NN want to decide where the song is going and in the end no one is happy with the result. I found it especially confusing when trying to play the same note twice and it changed the note, or when changing the note and it played the same note again.
But as I said it's an interesting experiment none the less!
I seriously think that more and more musicians will employee programmers for musical reasons.
Here is his Tiny Desk Concert. Pretty amazing stuff.
The MIDI interfaces on the pianos aren't at all novel, either: any piano can be retrofitted with a PianoDisc system. Just about every pipe organ nowadays also has MIDI capabilities.
> The Icelandic multi-instrumentalist and composer's fourth solo LP finds him working with Stratus, a piece of computer software he programmed over two years in collaboration with Halldór Eldjárn. It uses MIDI values triggered by what Arnalds plays on his primary piano (equipped with a Moog Piano Bar) to generate different sequences on two player pianos. The process can create randomized feedback and lead to progressions that might be unplayable by conventional methods. Arnalds has described it as a way to change up his creative thinking: "You get ideas that you would never get otherwise, just because this inspired those ideas." https://www.residentadvisor.net/news/41922
> The MIDI interfaces on the pianos aren't at all novel, either: any piano can be retrofitted with a PianoDisc system. Just about every pipe organ nowadays also has MIDI capabilities.
Well if you listen the pianos they have a totally different sound and it is due to the mechanical way they were designed. He has stated that he had spent tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours to get the two pianos to sound this particular way. This isn't some simple little trick that anyone could pull off.
Serious question, though, that I hope will start some debate:
I know some people that would consider this to be a hinderance to music but I, personally, think it's great that this could potentially be used to bring people into music that normally would be too intimidated to consider it. Is this still considered "playing music" since the person using it is still making choices and decisions even if those choices are aided by the computer algorithm?
Think about hang drums, diatonic harmonicas, or about the Tenori-on. They make it basically impossible to play a "wrong" note. But a normal piano was already a step in this direction.
A piano restricts the pitches to discrete ones, making it harder to play a "wrong" pitch. Violins, and to some extent, guitars, have continuous pitches. And there are indeeded some pitch nuances that piano players can at best hope to hear (e.g C# vs Db), and some pitch effects that a piano player can only mimic (glissando, vibrato).
However, nobody today would argue that a piano player isn't really "playing music".
> this could potentially be used to bring people into music that normally would be too intimidated to consider it
And this is where the real issue lies IMHO: playing or making music shouldn't be "intimidating", but the way we teach it certainly doesn't help.
Many things that humans do are intimidating - such as running a marathon, climbing Everest, or inventing Smalltalk.
Removing challenges devalues the personal satisfaction of mastery. Making any art simple makes it trivial and unexpressive.
So you can't say anything of interest or value with machine music that does most of the musicking for you. You can make some sort-of-music-like noises, but that's all.
Interesting. But my point is actually unrelated to history. It's related to the tradeoff between "easy to play" and "expressive power":
There are some steps you can take, as an instrumentist, in the "easy" direction, while still keeping enough expressive power.
> Removing challenges devalues the personal satisfaction of mastery.
Surely. It's unclear, though, how instrumentist mastery correlates with musicality:
Some virtuoso guitar solos can be considered "non-musical". To the other extreme, some great composers don't use any musical instrument (from classical music composers, to Amiga sequenced-music composers) - some of them can't even play their own compositions properly!
> Making any art simple makes it trivial and unexpressive.
This reminds me of an old a running joke on french TV, starring a fake David Guetta having a custom piano built, with only one key ( a reference to the intro of "I Gotta Feeling" ). I think it's safe to say that you can't express a lot with a such a piano :-)
However, a smart 10-key "piano" opens new horizons: because now it's reasonnably possible to "play" multiple pianos at the same time. I can certainly see new forms of mastery and non-trivial expressiveness here (e.g a setup of 4 "smart keyboards", each of them using a different sound).
As it is, you're never going to get a melody or accompaniment out of it.
Anyone ever seen an original real book? Asking for a friend :-)
And there's plenty of data available - Project Midomi[1], for example, has accumulated enough data to recognize popular music by (often out-of-tune) humming.
The next step would be doing it in real time, latching onto your humming and providing a backing track!
I think they could be set up in public places where pianos are to get people a little more into it.
Future versions could include co-creating the patch and store/recall in memory.
Is there an ABBA mode?
I actually once noticed that melodies of popular tunes tend to hover around the chord keys. The duration and probability of a given note favors chord keys. I built a Compose-A-Tron based on this pattern, and it mostly worked, but probably wouldn't generate any #1 hits. (Although, it could be improved with tweaking; but so could ordinary draft "on paper" compositions.)