Bubble Sorted Amen Break | Hacker News Reader

Bubble Sorted Amen Break

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383 pointseieio123 comments

I wish it'd play through the whole thing in order at the end

100% this. Because I'm a masochist, I let it run through 128 random slices. Took maybe 15 mins (wasn't timing or anything). Definitely deserved the payoff at the end to hear the whole thing.

I anticipated this problem and increased the BPM to get through it in about 30s to see if it'd be worth the time haha.

If you never play the original sample, you never have to worry about royalties.

:rollsafe-think-about-it:

Funnily enough, there's a drum loop that's also frequently sampled in electronic music from a track titled "Think (About It)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(About_It)

> If you never play the original sample, you never have to worry about royalties.

Even if you do, you don't.[0]

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-34785551

If I’d known, I would have contributed.

Alas it would have been too late for Gregory Coleman himself.

Is there a statue of him somewhere?

The unshuffled song: https://youtu.be/qwQLk7NcpO4 :)

(Same here - though at least so I learned about the Amen Break.)

You don't know it by heart even yet, after all the time it's been in countless songs?

I haven't heard it in the original order many times!

(the amen break is one of the most commonly-sampled drum breaks in popular music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break)

And a tragic story at that:

>Coleman died homeless and destitute in 2006. It was unlikely he was aware of the impact he had made on music. Neither he [band leader Spencer] nor Coleman received royalties for the break.

I’ve heard conflicting accounts about their knowledge and royalties.

While I’m certain they didn’t receive royalties from all artists, I heard many 80s artists did. And Amen Brothers took others to court. So they would have know about the use of the break.

I will admit I haven’t done any independent research into this matter personally. Just echoing accounts I’ve read and taking their reports at face value.

> And Amen Brothers took others to court.

Who is "Amen Brothers"?

"Amen, Brother" is the name of the track it's from, so the parent is likely referring to the band.

Yeah, the band is The Winstons. I'm curious how parent knew that they went to court when they don't know the name of the band.

> I'm curious how parent knew that they went to court

I didn’t say I knew they went to court. I just said I thought I read about it.

Looking into it again now, all I can find is a 10+ year old article about a crowd fund (eg https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-34785551). So I’m likely misremembering what I read previously.

> when they don't know the name of the band.

I just got the name of the band muddled with the name of the song. I also sometimes get get the names of my friends and loved ones muddled. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know them either. I’m just shit with names.

I do however remember every useless number I learned as a child. Including phone numbers to kids TV shows. Human memory is weird :-/

It’s pronounced “Allman Brothers”

It's pronounced "Doobie Brothers"

A reminder that your society will be judged not on how the most fortunate lived but how the least fortunate lived. Context still matters but there's a meaningful difference between "Anne Brontë died of Consumption (Tuberculosis), at that time there was no cure" and "Dave died of TB, he couldn't afford the cure at current market prices".

Sure. Which is your society though?

Unless you are one of the rare unintegrated humans†, in which case you wouldn't read HN because you don't have any of the necessary technology, there is only a single human society. Given that, we should be uncomfortable about how we're doing on that "least fortunate" thing...

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

So why is it not our society? Are you an unintegrated human, hence why you have the external view on things?

No need to nitpick. Being one among many in an X, one can perfectly use "our X", "my X" and "your X" to denote the same X, there is no logical error in that.

Now, the connotation is different: saying "our X will be judged by.." spreads the responsibility among everyone and makes it too easy to shift the blame onto the next guy, while saying "your X will be judged by.." stresses on your personal contribution to the X, making it not that easy to shy away.

I think the personal pronoun you use is very interesting.

In your case, you seemed to be representing the common idea of a different culture, ie 'my society thought your society was this or that', eg 'Muslims think western societies to be greedy and unkind'.

Do you really think of yourself as one of many? If so, which type do you identify as? And then, do you think you are personally responsible for the actions of others of your type?

I personally think the general usage of a general collective pronouns to be inevitably misleading, but has the benefit of allowing one's preferred poor and unsubstantiated beliefs to be stated as indisputable fact.

What is a mote in such a society to do though? Dave couldn't afford the cure, but neither can I. What do you suggest I do to make it affordable for both of us?

yes, What Is to Be Done?

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

This is our manifesto. We are creative people. Here is our strategy for advancing creative work and supporting the people who do it.

We upvote comments that completely miss the point of how this algorithm works. We upvote comments that claim the algorithm does nothing at all. We downvote comments about how the creator of the original drum break died destitute.

"Samples" were kind of like musical memes in the 1980s. What made for a good sample had a lot more to do with convenience and luck. The sounds that were picked for drum samples had more to do with how useful they were - the dynamic range, how isolated the drums are, how easy they were to mix.

The other famous drum sample - the "Funky Drummer" as drummed by Clyde Stubblefield for James Brown, Stubblefield didn't think the particular drum pattern he used was particularly noteworthy. In that case, James Brown's production choices were actually more key - his signature sound revolved around really crisp drums that he insisted needed to be clear on AM Radio and Jukeboxes. Which is what made it so useful for sampling.

Samplers became accessible at the time which allowed music production with just loops. Look at snap I got the power. All looped samples

I mean, look at any house or hip-hop track, sampling's like the most fundamental part of both genres.

The track you've mentioned is the prime example of the blend of those two genres. Before the term Eurodance caught on, this track would be referred to as hip-house (as in hip-hop + house). Chicago and the broader NY area did it first, but it was a Belgian track that first topped the US charts (Technotronic's Pump Up The Jam).

That's why one of the super simple improvements I'd make to music copyright law, if I had to choose one thing rather than a massive overhaul, is for sampling to also be subject to the compulsory mechanical royalty system.

So any artist could sample something, do some paperwork, and send of a fraction of royalties. Rather than the current system where you need explicit permission from the recording artist and have no recourse if they say no.

So many music genres exist because of sampling, and the shit legal precedents set in recent decades ruined an amazing thing.

Completely agree with you, but good music always finds its way around copyright, you just can't find it on streaming services.

For example, if the sample's small enough to not be recognisable by algorithms, they often end up on Soundcloud with a free download via Hypeddit. Some even get away with charging money for their track with non-cleared samples via Bandcamp. Because those types of bedroom producers are almost always clueless about copyright, they often cite fair use in the description and choose a Creative Commons licence, which is not how anything works. Even some B-list celebrities that damn well know what they're doing still decide to do that when they fail to clear a sample. Soundcloud would be completely irrelevant if they did a good-enough job at enforcing copyright, so they do the bare minimum labels require of them to keep running, but that definitely kills their odds of ever competing with the likes of Spotify.

Then there's a whole "gray area" of online record pools where the audio preview and download links are hidden behind a $25/month or so paywall, so record labels can't scan it directly to even know about the infringement. Usually just listing the names of available tracks in HTML is enough to get them de-indexed from Google, but they rely on word-of-mouth anyway.

And, of course, even if all of that were to stop, you can never prevent a bunch of DJs and producers DMing each other tracks, hottest of which always end up getting shared too widely at some point and uploaded to Soulseek or something.

Meanwhile, streaming services are being flooded by unethically-trained, AI-generated music, which is actually incredibly easy to detect if streaming services actually gave enough of a fuck to do so. There is one that gives a fuck rather publicly (Deezer) and according to them, it's ~34% of everything uploaded as of a few months ago, may have passed 40% as of now.

Your proposal makes complete sense and would allow artists the creative freedom to use samples in unusual and novel ways that the original artist might never have envisioned – or agreed to.

I’m a big fan of the KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front) and when the artist says “no”, I’m always reminded of this funny, surreal story about the KLF physically destroying their music: http://klf.de/home/the-abba-incident/

> Belgian track

What a wasted chance to say "Belgian techno anthem"!

Maybe, but the amen break has a very specific je ne sais quoi that makes it way more useful and pleasant as a sample than almost any other sample. There's just so many situations in the kind of music I make where the amen is like the only loop that fits. Funky drummer might come in second.

It could just be its cultural weight has me hypnotized. But maybe its just that good

I’ve produced music through much of 2010-2020, I wasn’t there in the 1980-2010s but it wasn’t uncommon see discussion online about different samples or things like this. Never really seen any mention something like this unquantified “je ne sais quoi” or at least don’t really recall

My take is, it was the first of its kind to widely circulate exhibiting desirable quantities for sampling, a combination of good enough and path dependency. After a certain level of saturation/entrenchment it carried an aesthetic compared to readily available samples (maybe this is what you meant).

Whenever I couldn’t find a breakbeat sample (or wanted some starting point at least) I’d default to it. When I did music production it was very easy to get your hands on a loop but obviously that’s much later.

amen and funky drummer are fun but I find it funner to chop up the apache break. it's got a little bongo in there

I saw a video about popular/influential/most-used samples the other week[0] and it mentioned James Brown becoming aware of sampling (I guess mid-late 90s?) and specifically making sure that anything he thought might be sample-able was "clean" from that point on.

[0] GFL finding anything in YouTube history / search these days hence no link. Wasn't from Synthet, I don't think.

You said it wasn't from Synthet, but they did release a video ~2 weeks ago which talked about exactly that. Super interesting, whether it's the correct video or not!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K71XefOlJh0

> You said it wasn't from Synthet, but they did release a video ~2 weeks ago which talked about exactly that.

Good grief, I thought it might be that video but somehow completely blanked on it when I double-checked and decided it wasn't. Thanks for actually checking usefully!

(Synthet videos are almost always worth a watch even if you can't remember them a couple of weeks later. Old age, innit.)

Reminds me of Motown's James Jamerson [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jamerson

That's true, though there was a community fundraising a while back. Many well known dnb and jungle dj's donated there.

https://ra.co/news/28370

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

great deep dive into the Amen break. this video is from the yt days of yore, nice to see the yt algo still propping it up.

My personal prize for the most chopped amen goes to Breakage’s Final mix of Equinox’s Acid Rain VIP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoKlz6_I4vY

Wow I've heard pieces of this but never the full thing, incredible

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI5Qlo2Y6Jg

Nice pick! Above that same song but not compressed to hell

I like this one for amen stuff. Heavyweight Vol.4 - Untitled 7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfyHx7SCn3g

Worlds colliding here.

We're dropping amen selections now?

Some classics that sound like what the app is sortin':

Remarc - Sound Murderer (Loafin' in Brockley Mix) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SUdpCVITxc

Splash - Babylon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vghx8SEeH8

DJ Krome & Mr. Time - The License https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPa5JBg8hZI

Source Direct - Secret Liason https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfEWCVoB45s

Danny Breaks - Droppin' Science Vol 1A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqZT-Jse5rQ

> We're dropping amen selections now?

Futurama theme! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz8HmN2uvuk

Krome & Time - Studio One https://youtu.be/SdelbMo_YZM

Absolutely love this.

Thanks heaps! I very much love the 'old-school' jungle/uk-hardcore sound and didn't know about these more recent Suburban Base releases, and your other reccs were also great too! Amen break went soooo far!

My particular favourite is in demoscene tracker music where Amen also went all over the place (and sampling more generally too!)

I'm not sure if the below is actual Amen-break (need to ask BrothomStates probably!) but it's certainly in the spirit of it and this is definitely near or at the top of my favourite demos ever, I just find it so damned cool! "The Day the Earth was Born" by TPOLM:

https://youtu.be/rt8cOLZHQ4c?si=Y323k8qog3Tv8uou

Venjent - We Need Jungle [I'm afraid]

https://youtu.be/isiVdlz8bDY?si=InoeqWTHZ3UaD1sJ

High five fellow DnB heads :)

That Source Direct release was out of this world... absolutely beautiful body of work

Hype for Equinox in Sheffield on Sat

Love that tune. Some of my personal favorites, amen andrews - jungle bunny, doc scott - here comes the drumz (breakage remix), loxy & ink - murder inc (twisted anger remix), pendulum - through the loop, dj hidden - times like these

I like Bruce Lee Mc by Quincy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUqsDy3TD3Y

Not so much chopped, but definitely amen.

THAT AMEN TRK !!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAY36F4u55Y

And hand chopped! I remember them playing an early version of this on bbc radio 1 (1extra?). That version was a bit rougher but better imho

Very nice. But surely the most chopped up amen break is Virtual Riot's Death by Amen.

https://youtu.be/XpnNVWOC98A

Cool, but I don't see how it's sorting anything. It just seems to play a randomized arrangement of the slices. You can re-randomize as much as you like but there's no sort option as far as I can see.

Give it a minute or two.

Did you play it to the end? It's absolutely sorting from smallest to largest. Unless you have a confused understanding of a bubble sort, it's doing a bubble sort

Not the OP but I stopped listening pretty quickly because I was confused about how it was sorted.

It wasn’t until I read your comment that I realised the sorting happened while you were listening rather than before hand.

Same! thanks for saving the experience for me :)

So it's sorting from earliest to latest, really?

The value that is being sorted isn't obvious to me. It's obvious that it is sorting it. I'm guessing maybe some dB level of each of the hits/notes. If that was the case, I'd expect the initial unsorted view to line up with the pattern of the waveforms which is not the case. Maybe it's just an unsorted list of values sorted in sync to the rhythm. It's weird though that the segment corresponds to a segment of the audio. I just don't see how they are linked.

It's sorting by index of the slice. Pressing "shuffle" jumbles the slices up. So it puts the slices of the break back in the correct order. You never hear the result.

Set it to 8 slices and it becomes easy to see what it's doing: look at the waveform and the now-playing highlight jumping around.

It randomizes slices of the sample and begins to play the slices in the random order. Meanwhile it begins the bubble sort algorithm at a pace that matches the tempo, sorting the slices into their chronological order. Throughout, it only plays the unsorted slices. (I was kinda hoping it would play the sorted sample at the end.)

I actually wanted it to play them as it went, so that it would be <unsorted><sorted> each time through, with the former shrinking and the latter growing.

You're right. It doesn't play the sorted parts, which is strange. I expected to have a series of random-then-controlled slices with the random part getting shorter and the controlled part getting longer, but it really is just a shortening loop of random beats.

Would have been cool if it played the sorted ones at the end as a final run through victory lap

The idea is that it slices the Amen Break into however many slices you specify, and the list being sorted is the indices for those slices. At each step, it plays the slice the pivot is being compared to.

Because it only plays the samples being compared, it never plays the sorted chunks, so it's missing a "punchline" of sorts.

I was surprised at how frustrating it was to not hear the sorted result at the end.

I was confused at first at what the different "levels" mean. But they're not levels, they're just indices.

I would suggest the author changes the UI to just show a number instead of a bar, to make this clearer.

It’s sorting by time

Automatic chopping has existed for decades, popularised here: https://web.archive.org/web/20051225061044/http://www.cus.ca... https://github.com/mdsp/Livecut See also, dblue Glitch, chrisGlitch, Renoise

Yes, and on many samplers too. The linked website looks like a 'lite' version of the slicer on my Elektron Octatrack ;)

That's a fun two minutes for any computer scientist drum and bass fan.

I can't help laughing. This is great.

I don't understand the comparison function, but it's really enjoyable listening to the algorithm work out its logic.

It's comparing the t value.

That is so much simpler than any of the possibilities I had imagined!

If you aren’t familiar with the Amen Break, here’s a now classic 18 minute documentary on the Amen Break and its origins and evolution:

https://youtu.be/5SaFTm2bcac?si=J99_Sh9x3fIBCSms

Not playing it all the way through at the end is diabolical.

This documentary from 2004 (uploaded to YouTube in 2006(!)) is how I learned about the Amen Break and it's immense influence on the music of the 80s and 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

This deserves the top spot on the front page!

Might I ask for the implementation of other sorting algorithms here?

It sounds like a Ventian Snares track. Love it.

I just put on a Venetian Snares album (Rossz Csillag Alatt Született) and thought I'd come back here to say the same as you have!

I'd also add: It's like Aaron's whole career is slightly resting atop Amen Break, at least as far back as (first I heard and still my favorite) The Chocolate Wheelchair Album! Amazing detailed work with Amen and similar samples that's for sure!

This is one of those things you see and get angry you didn't wake up the idea first. It's so perfect and just as satisfying as you'd hope. Incredible stuff!

Different bubble sort

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4EMG63W388

Or types of sorts

This afternoon I was getting the oil changed for my car, and while I was in the waiting room the Amen Break started playing from a nearby speaker.

Cool but I'm a bit confused - bubble sorted by what, exactly? Like what is the y-axis?

Y is essentially the order. If you take the recording and start slicing. The first slices are the smaller ones and the later slices are the taller ones.

I would have expected it to be terrible to listen to, but it was pretty nice.

Yup, this is essentially what the original concept of the Jungle genre was built around. Chop up the Amen Break, mix the notes(?) around, repeat them as you see fit, and add other samples/vocals around the drum patterns you've created.

A couple favorites from the 90s:

https://youtu.be/mL2Bgj-za5k?si=fhXHhNGjA-RZkiD7

https://youtu.be/a5meT63flnM?si=ggvypNCFfUUq3Qxq

429 Too Many Requests

At first I didn't understand, but then I did.

Should I understand what this is trying to show?

Would love to hear it unsorting the same array.

I need WebGL to play audio on HTML pages now?

it's an application built with webgl that plays audio, rather than just an audio player

Can someone explain the comparison function?

This is bonkers and I love it.

tbh i expect it to be much more interesting if doing other kind of sorts

This is unreasonably fun.

what is the y axis on that graph? what are we sorting?

Is that IDM ?

-100 points for not having a volume slider.

lol, that's the stupidest thing that I've ever watched all the way through with a grin the whole time.

Can we get an Amen quicksort now?

No sound on iPhone. Shame Apple is so hostile to the web. Tragic really.

iOS seems to mute the web audio apis when the phone is in silent mode (the switch on the side of the phone). If you toggle it on, then this site (and many others) play sound.

I have no idea why it works this way and it’s frequently annoying.

Why wouldn't it work that way? Whether it's a hardware toggle like on iPhone or a software one like in Android, I want silent to mean silent. Not "silent but if a web page decides to play sound it can".

There is some amount of the "Focus follows brain" problem here. What we want is for things to do what we meant, all the time, and in this case it's very possible that the visitor wanted to hear the music. It is not practical (without yet to invented technology) for that to work so we have a substitute - there's a switch and you should remember to press it.

"Focus follows brain" is how everybody wants windowed UIs to work. When I type on the keyboard the letters go where my brain thought they should go - duh, but of course that's unimplementable, so the Windows UI provides "Click to focus" - if I click on a Window the typing goes there until I click another window, meanwhile some Unix systems do "Focus follows Mouse" - if I move the mouse over a Window then my typing goes there even without clicking. Neither is what we actually wanted, both are trying to approximate.

Many many times I have music playing in the background from another app while browsing. So no, there’s no way to focus follow brain. There’s just no way for this device to know what I want unless I tell it

The phone will still make sound if I launch a music app, why is a web page different?

And I hate web pages making sound! But the UX is confusing, and it’s changed over the years, seemingly without reason.

Iphones now have a software toggle as well, which may have coincided with the shift from “mute ringer” to “mute (almost) everything” that came with the multifunction button.

> why is a web page different?

Web browsers on desktop operating systems initially allowed any website to play audio without any interaction required. Some websites would blast annoying audio ads as soon as you opened a page on their site. So effort was put into making it so that web browsers on desktops would only play sound after user interaction via mouse click. Later, some websites were exempted from that by some desktop web browsers, for example YouTube I think.

Even without ads, background noise that starts automatically as soon as you visit a page can be distracting and disruptive.

I’m perfectly happy that Safari on iOS does not play background audio when I have my phone in silent mode. Even when I have tapped on buttons on the page.

Silent mode is not entirely only for notifications anyway. The built-in keyboard is also silent in silent mode, whereas when silent mode is off it makes an annoying click sound for every button that you press. Likewise the builtin camera app on iOS makes a shutter sound when you take photos with silent mode off. With silent mode the camera app is silent. Same with taking screenshots. I take a lot of screenshots, and prefer that people around me don’t think I’m taking photos when I am taking a screenshot on the phone.

Meanwhile, if I open a music player app on my phone and hit play, I have made a very deliberate choice about playing sound.

All of the games on my phone I can think of are also silent in silent mode. Not sure if all games have to be silent in silent mode or not on iOS (i.e. if “can play sound in silent mode” is a special permission in iOS and if Apple disallows apps categorized as games in App Store from having that permission or not). But I like that the games I play on my phone are silent in silent mode.

There is some inconsistency indeed about what is silent or not, but I am happy with the way that it is as someone who prefers surprising silence over surprising noises from my phone when it’s in silent mode.

That screenshot matrix gets painful quickly once devices/locales grow. Are you doing iOS/Android and roughly how many locales x sizes?

Was this comment posted by a bot?

Because silent mode is for the notifications. App volume has its own dedicated buttons.

media sound is generally unaffected by the silent mode toggle, which apple suggests is only for notifications. but the toggle inconsistently affects media, muting some things but not others. it's incredibly frustrating. android has much better audio controls for notifications, media, alarms, and vibrate.

How old of an iPhone does one need to have that switch? My 6S+ has one, but a 15 doesn’t.

My 14 has the switch. I believe the 15 is when they switched to a programmable "action" button in place of the switch.

I can hear it. Chrome on iOS 26.

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