Sonant: A tool for creating generative music based on random walks | Hacker News Reader

Sonant: A tool for creating generative music based on random walks

sonant.generated.space

106 pointshardmaru19 comments

Source is here: https://github.com/kgolid/sonant

Some of the generative art on the author's website is really neat (neater than this music generator, IMO!) Eg. "Byrne proofs," which generates imaginary visual proofs. Whenever I come across these things, I dream about some kind of generative art museum. Definitely something I would subscribe to!

What a cool idea! Minor suggestion -- start/stop feature is pretty buggy. Pressing stop seems to do nothing, pressing start seems to start a new instance, but not stop the old instance, causing both instances to play on top of each other.

Stop appears to cause the old instance to play through to the end, but not start a new instance right away. So it works, but it's really delayed; I think most users would expect an instant mute from a button labeled "Stop." Perhaps a relabel would set better expectations.

Interesting, I didn't test it that far. My pathetically low tolerance as a user kicked in beforehand. If it behaves more like "queue next", then that's what it should be named. Although, a queue next function without the concept of a playlist makes little sense compared to a stop/start.

Thank you! You are absolutely right; the start/stop is not working perfectly at the moment. ‘Stop’ ends the music after it finishes the progression, ‘start’ immediately starts a new progression without waiting for the old to actually stop. Guess it’s worth to point out that this in no way is considered a finished product :)

Seems like my 2 year old loves the generated music. I think toys with autogenerated music for kids is something I haven’t seen but would be quite a success and not too hard to do either.

I swear I already heard a ton of music generated this way on my spotify Discovery playlist...

You might want to add licensing info. The output is good enough to use in video production as background

Just so that you know.. your page gets a 'very risky' alert from mcafee webadviser.. (work computer.. don't look at me like that) https://imagebin.ca/v/59K7tGipVJiD (screenshot)

Thanks for the tip, will check into that!

Love it! A MIDI export would make this really fun to experiment with.

I agree it's missing a MIDI export button.

+1 for a MIDI export button.

Yes, please! This would be a really neat tool. There are already some Ableton devices that are similar. Makes me want to investigate how to build a device.

This is great for an atmospheric game. It's so easy to adapt things on the fly that it could provide a dynamic atmosphere to whatever is happening in-game.

I wish that changing the key would cause a stop and restart, otherwise it seems like a really nice machine version of continuous wind chimes.

It finishes the progression before it applies the key change. I figured that sounded most natural. I might want to write that down somewhere, though.

For a moment, I thought this post would be about generating brown noise and calling it music.

it would be more interesting to hear it without the violin in the background which appears to make it sound better than it is?

Hehe, the underlying chords plays a big role, yes ;)

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