22 musical pieces written with 140 characters of code | Hacker News Reader

22 musical pieces written with 140 characters of code

supercollider.sourceforge.net

33 pointsPaton21 comments

The musical pieces are fascinating from an algorithmic point of view, but to call them "music" is to use the word "music" very loosely.

Not an Autechre fan, I take it? ;)

please explain why this is using the word "music" loosely?

Track #2: LFSAW, sums the answer to that up in 140 characters, I think. :)

LFSAW is much more musical than some of the tracks from Japanese noise artists that I've heard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_composition

"Algorithmic composition is the technique of using algorithms to create music."

3. Tim Walters... maybe I'm not hip enough to realize how avant garde this is, but that is noise.

Some examples of what might qualify as music, but oh god, wading through the cacophony of noise was difficult.

Well, it's music if a listener perceives it as music. Play those mp3s to someone who doesn't know how they were created. I found some of them pretty impressing. It made me download sc. I haven't had a chance yet to work through the tutorial though.

You're sure you aren't experiencing the same thing as a pensioner describing rap music?

A lot of the music in movies shares similar characteristics. In fact I could imagine some of these tracks in a movie.

I'm experiencing the exact same thing I experience with most rap music: I think it is godawful. The first one was reasonable, but the three that followed made my ears bleed and prevented me from listening to the other 18 songs.

I could imagine some of these tracks in a movie, but for the most part they seem a more random than is typical for the dramatic requirements of a movie. Most of these pieces have a few ideas that stretch out over several minutes. Movie music tends to have specific cues. There are precise moments when the music changes to guide the scene in a particular direction. The attention to structure required by a typical movie does not seem evident in most of these selections.

Now, this music is full of ideas that could be great in a movie. But the pieces themselves, for the most part, are not especially dramatic. They'd have to be re-worked into a movie, at which point they probably would no longer be 140 characters of code.

Actually, I think the issue is that music is a very broad term and it is not clear exactly how narrow use of it is in this case.

22 pieces in 140 characters sounds amazing, because people imagine that the result is a selection of existing recognizable music from across different genres, when it fact these are pieces written in a such a way that take advantage of supercollider's strengths.

Number 6, for example, appears to be a minimalist phase-shift piece[1]. There are two or three small musical ideas that are of slightly different lengths and repeated for several minutes. The result is the musical equivalent of watching windshield wipers that are slightly out of sync. It can be hypnotic and interesting. It's also incredibly difficult to PERFORM, and part of the enjoyment of hearing a piece like Steve Reich's "Violin Phase" is knowing that these are real humans with real violins doing this[2].

But it's known as minimalist for a reason-- it's music created with an extreme economy of musical ideas. That nearly 10 minutes of Violin Phasing can be described succinctly (in English) with much greater technical accuracy than one could describe the final movement of Brahms Piano Concerto Number 1 [3], which is only slightly longer.

Thus, minimalist music lends itself very well to a succinct description in code as well. So, while "music" is a term that includes everything from Brahms and Reich to Miley Cyrus, it's not clear whether supercollider could actually describe pieces like that so succinctly without obvious cheating [4].

[1] Wiki article on phasing in music: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phasing

[2] Live performance of Reich's Violin Phase: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su1OvwR3wB4

[3] Brahms Piano cto #1 mvt 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfs1X2-lEhU (pt 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF5IyHls560 (pt 2)

[4] eg something like Buffer.read("brahms.wav").play.

You probably wouldn't like Charles Dodge very much either. There are some people that really get into this though, check out Computer Music Journal.

Trust me, from the few tracks I listened to, this is some of the more listenable computer music I've heard.

I listen to a lot of music that some would call noise and here's my 2c on the subject.

It is much like being a kid who doesn't like brocoli. It tastes revolting at first, you can't imagine anyone liking it, etc. Sure enough your parents force you to eat it anyways and by the time you're an adult, you love brocoli soup with a side of brussel sprouts.

Or like Yoga; can you imagine feeling comfortable, blissful, ecstatic! with your body bent that way?

With music or Yoga no one will force-feed you so the exercise of expanding your 'palette' is left up to you.

There are some pieces of music that I could not listen to when they came out and now I love them. I found them too harsh or unpleasant but now I can go to sleep listening to them.

Also as a side note: a lot of electronic music is more about (the elusive...) timbre than melody or rhythm, since we have almost full control over how it sounds.

I've spent the day so far playing with sclang[1]. It's quite a nice language. Dynamic, OO, first class functions. Definitely worth a look, in my opinion.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCollider#The_SuperCollider...

Reminds me of module music in demoscene.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module_file

This is entirely unrelated.

Module music is composed out of series of commands-events: Looping constructs exist, however there are no conditionals or creation of new structures (patterns in a module are not first class)

These 140 chars pieces here are made using a (close-to) general purpose programming language, a variant of smalltalk called SuperCollider.

Fun, but what languages/libraries are being used? I don't understand why this information isn't in the post.

Some software called Supercollider.

Here's the article that links to that page.

http://thewire.co.uk/articles/3177/

The post is on the website of the software that was used. Take a look at the navigation bar.

Argh my ears! Too loud! I'll stick with my analogue synths.

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