The Infinite Drum Machine | Hacker News Reader

The Infinite Drum Machine

experiments.withgoogle.com

226 pointsbased243 comments

Here’s an opera music generator from the same site that I’ve spent an embarrassingly large amount of time playing with: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/blob-opera

Very fun. Thanks for sharing.

The results sound a lot like the techno that Wishmountain (aka Matthew Herbert) was making with household objects a few years back

Wishmountain - Radio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM1mN91YDgw

Wishmountain - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2CV8m4u16E

Hey thanks for the clue; that Wishmountain drum track is awesome! :)

Meh. This is an extremely basic drum machine / step sequencer with a larger number samples, and I'm pretty sure I've seen the "sample cloud" approach lots of times by now in various VSTs. Probably still fun for folk with zero exposure to music production!

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."

It's funny, but hard to make anything sound good due to inconsistent hit points in the samples. Even with a very simple pattern nothing sounds very rhythmic to my ears.

Yeah honestly it's pretty weak compared to an actual music sequencing DAW like FL Studio or even an app like Patterning 2.

Doesn't seem to have a lot of … drums?

No hi hat, no tom tom. No "taiko" drums which I realize is a bit broad. "Cymbals" nets me three "percussion finger bells" (okay, technically, I suppose?) and one "percussion drums".

Some snare and timpani…

This is a fairly basic interface, I'm kind of surprised there hasn't been more of a scene of making unusual music interfaces in the format of Electroplankton on the Nintendo DS.

It does seem to be one of those things where the people with the musical knowledge to potentially make super creative interfaces have gotten so deep into the technical side of things that they struggle to make intuitive UIs.

Electroplankton example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BexGR0OQF-I

That's neat. I found a tune that works for me within seconds.

How do I share it?

What do you suppose they mean when they call it "infinite"?

I'm not seeing much description of what the concept behind the project is supposed to be.

I think it's supposed to be some kind of latent vector space where the coordinate maps to the sounds' timbre. So in theory, you can move seamlessly between sounds. But I seem to only be able to snap to nearest sound. Edit: they use t-SNE for the embedding so that is why it is discrete. But if they used something like an autoencoder, then you could have a smooth continuum and interpolate between say a dog bark and a billiards clack.

It's in a loop

this is true for every sequencer I've used so far

There's no way to increase the row column count.

Doesn’t work for me on iOS. Just says Loading when I open the page.

If only there was a BPM readout, this would be stellar.

Why is there even "AI" in the url? It's a funny "thing", but there is nothing in there related to AI is there?

see kortex' t-SNE related comment below

Thx

I'm guessing the classification might have been done by an AI?

The website is super smooth and the experience is great! Wonder what it's built with...

Looks like three.js with WebGL.

Nice! Has anyone figured out a good way to export the sounds and the MIDI?

Sounds are loaded via http, so copy the link and use curl. E.g. https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ai/drum-machine/view/audi... and https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ai/drum-machine/view/meta.... I don't think there's any MIDI.

This is freaking amazing and so intuitive.

No sound on my iphone x

Usually with these things I've to actively turn off the silent switch on my iPhone for audio to be enabled. Definitely if it's a Tone.js app, which it probably is?

They should be able to detect it's an iphone and issue an warning message for that though seeing as a lot of people will have that switch enabled

Reminds me of FruityLoops.

das

> Built by Kyle McDonald, Manny Tan, Yotam Mann, and friends at Google Creative Lab.

Pretty sure Cabbibo did something remarkably similar a couple of years ago: https://store.steampowered.com/app/694550/Audio_Forager/

Cabbibo actually replied on Twitter. All looks above board: https://twitter.com/Cabbibo/status/1373794380700524550?s=20

Sounds like they copied XLN Audio XO - https://assets.xlnaudio.com/pages/xo/1.2/gui-screens/main_2x...

They should at least mention what was the "inspiration". Not cool Google.

https://www.xlnaudio.com/products/xo

Isn't this project older than XO? Commits go back 5 years.

https://github.com/googlecreativelab/aiexperiments-drum-mach...

XO was launched 2019

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/product-alerts-older-than-2-...

Looks like the "inspiration" might have been the other way around. Don't see a problem with that, all of art is built upon each others ideas.

Oh I didn't know. Thank you for sharing!

shouldn't you edit your comment to remove the passive aggressive accusation?

I doesn't let me

The idea is hardly novel. http://imtr.ircam.fr/imtr/CataRT is seminal in this regard and much much older.

CataRT has moved here https://forum.ircam.fr/projects/detail/catart-standalone/

That's just the standalone. CataRT has many incarnations and that is just one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com