JazzKeys: Type to improvise Jazz music | Hacker News Reader

JazzKeys: Type to improvise Jazz music

jazzkeys.plan8.co

194 pointsUniIsland59 comments

Reminds me of Mikutap: https://aidn.jp/mikutap/

This was incredibly fun. I just spent 10 minutes making what sounded pretty good to my ears.

Oh my god this is the best thing ever. I want to save this as audio to listen to.

That was awesome! I really want to make something like this now. I love how the samples are queued and played in time with the tempo.

Also https://touchpianist.com/

Edit: Oh, and this one looks silly but generates surprisingly nice chord progressions that actually resolve sometimes: https://www.adultswim.com/etcetera/choir/

The choir is absolutely amazing! Thanks for sharing!

For anyone who liked this, enjoy

https://www.incredibox.com/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20160430185156/http://www.madeon...

Patatap is probably my absolute favorite of all time when it comes to this kind of thing: https://patatap.com/

Nice touch that deleting letters descends chromatically. Letters typed appear unrelated to notes generated, you can type the same letter and it will keep generating different notes.

Also, it seems it will never resolve to the root, no matter what you type :(

Never give any satisfaction to the listener, no matter what, pretty much the most important rule of high brow jazz.

it makes you keep typing and be more productive. very clever, if you ask me.

This is mostly just using the keyboard to manipulate the rhythm/time performance of a pre-configured score. Interesting, but not what most would think of as jazz improvisation.

Not exactly. It is far more random than that. As far as I can tell, it plays random notes from a pre-loaded scale - occasionally chords, and punctuation marks play chords. Backspace plays a descending scale.

The aesthetics of it, including typography and sounds are very nice.

And typing () leads to a special easter egg :)

That's the case in "Free Form" mode.

If you click the eight note with a plus next you get pre-configured scores that you can just manipulate the rhythm on.

Wow I did not see the controls over there at all

It appears nobody noticed the "share" feature, which records your typing sequence and replays it. I think it's amazing to use this feature to write letters. Try reading this poem to see what I mean.

https://jazzkeys.plan8.co/?msg=-MBSxW78xad7GiKhvr6j

This is super friggin cool. I love this.

p.s. It also records your typos and deletions.

p.p.s. While I was typing this poem, my wife thought that I was listening to a new jazz song and asked me what song it was.

https://jazzkeys.plan8.co/?msg=-MBeGU8Te_CQdizj2E9v

I improvised this as I was typing. The "Peace Piece" song was the inspiration for what I wrote. It's a really fun way of creative writing. The text isn't very good, but it feels like writing is like a performance.

I want this as a VSCode or Vim extension!

Maybe something discordant when you type in a variable name that isn't defined? :D

wow if writing clean code improv'd a jazz piece i could definitely go back to coding 12 hours a day

godamnit, another side project idea that I'll never find the time to finish!

This is really well done. I find the default "free form" mode is by far the most interesting, and it's more complex than a lot of the comments are implying here. It cycles between different patterns, and the pattern is changed by inserting a space or punctuation. You can easily verify this by typing an extremely long word without spaces: the pattern becomes apparent, even though it's always transposed up or down by 5 semitones when it repeats. This interval is well chosen - it effectively explores all possible transpositions of the pattern, while keeping the transitions harmonious. This also means that the tonality is constantly wandering, there is no overall key but only transient tonalities.

Different punctuation marks provide different collections of more-or-less conclusive chords. This might be the only place where tonality is hinted at, especially if you bash the comma, you can hear it's rooted in one key for the whole session. As far as I can tell those special characters are / ! ? 1 . ,

I haven't figured out if the patterns are generated on-the-fly or chosen from a predefined set, but they tend to have a nice melodic quality.

Someone also mentioned special words rain and wind, but there are more... very fun to explore. The concept is nice but the execution is especially interesting.

Agreed. Great concept and execution.

The "share" feature shows that it also implemented a format to serialize the typing sequence and stores it on server.

If I still write letters to friends, I'd definitely start using this from now on.

Sounds nice, I like the minimalist look. But I think it would be a giant leap if the music was somehow related to what is being typed. Also it took a while to load, it could use a loading progress indicator — I thought it was broken and was opening it in different browsers thinking Safari wasn't supported.

I don't know anything about jazz or how to create any kind of music, but it's so relaxing to type while listening to these notes. I would love this as an application integrated with the OS, so I can listen it with every keystroke.

Try typing in "rain" or "wind"

"Ocean" also works

Or "window"

birds too :) this thing's a delight.

Also, can't figure out how to play the lick

There doesn't seem to be a way to affect the pitch, so figuring out how to play anything in particular is going to be tough.

Dammit, just play the right notes

I want that as an Emacs minor mode!

Interesting concept. Audio's crackly at times on my Linux Firefox. Though I keep waiting for something like this to show up that's more grounded in music theory…

Aww, I can't type outside ASCII range? Drat, I wanted to see whether different languages (even in Latin script) were distinguishable by sound this way.

I press the same letter on a keyboard and it just makes some jazz licks. How do I intend to play this?

ARGH How do I resolve to major????

Genius!! From what I can tell it seems to be random keys? Would be nice if a certain progression can be specified, but this is already awesome. Saving this as my new note taking tool.

I have a feature request BESIDES make it less random! When you delete all text with select all and then backspace/del it should make a huge loud combination of noises!

I need this as an emacs mode. Would make coding feel different

Ha very cool! I like that punctuation marks add some flair.

This is great. Would love to be able to enable this on my keyboard for typing everything as a bit of an upgrade over my super clicky mechanical keyboard.

In network inspector you can find midi files that can be downloaded and played for example in VLC.

Love it.. I reckon I could write an EP for listening to on the way to work!

There's an eathter egg!

No Android, unfortunately.

Why does it not work?

I got a message saying it won't work under Android.

This wins the day. How do I jam multiple instruments?

Would be cool to do sentiment analysis on the typed text to switch between major/minor or other characteristics.

Try:

....

Also try smileys:

:) and :(

(for major minor)

this is great. The Kohl concert is hard to type at the right pace though :)

Was just trying it. You have to try to guess where the interstitial notes will appear...

I thought I would be familiar enough with Blue in Green to get the tempo right, but my memory was no match for Bill Evans' improvisational style!

It's the Köln concert actually. The internet is pretty cool - you can look these things up when you don't know anything about them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Köln_Concert

Also, this JazzKeys post is worse than useless.

Vague related shameless plug, if anyone wants to give me feedback on this: https://practicemusic.net/ I'd gladly take it!

This might be intentional on your part, but it seems to mark enharmonic equivalents as incorrect (a 5th from Gb is Db, which is the same as C# but C# is marked as incorrect).

make it give a way to show the answer and/or move on -- I don't know what I'm doing, but I could learn if it taught me.

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