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Statistically Optimal Music 296

Posted by michael from the pop-rock dept.
ShinyPlasticBag writes "'Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live. What you hear on Eigenradio is the best of the New Music, distilled and de-correlated. One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio.' Listen up here or here (SHOUTcast)."
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Statistically Optimal Music More

Statistically Optimal Music

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  • Hello darkness, my old friend (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) * on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:46PM (#6828803) Homepage Journal
    I quickly checked out the site and hit the #1 "Listen" link. At first, it was an interesting mix... in fact, it sounded very much like tuning an AM radio between stations, except that the overlapping songs were in clearly-defined hi-fi.

    It was jarring at first, but then I got into a groove. They're right, the beat and the ambient voices have a strange but familiar variance.

    Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to keep up the experience. After about a minute, the rhythms stopped, replaced by a metallic, toneless hum.

    Cool... I've seen the Slashdot effect before, but now I'm getting to hear it!

    Footnote: the rhythm has returned, but there's a lot more buzz than before. Will be interesting to hear what happens when the non-subscriber flood hits.

    • Re:Hello darkness, my old friend (Score:4, Insightful)

      by turg ( 19864 ) * <turg@nospAM.winston.org> on Friday August 29, 2003 @06:04PM (#6828996) Journal

      What makes you think that the slashdot effect changes the content of the music?

      I heard the same thing that you did, but as I understand it, the only input that goes into the music is the content of the radio stations to which the server is listening. I don't see how the number of listeners to eigenradio would have cause the effect you're describing.

      • Re:Hello darkness, my old friend (Score:5, Insightful)

        by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) * on Friday August 29, 2003 @06:17PM (#6829090) Homepage Journal
        What makes you think that the slashdot effect changes the content of the music?

        I guess it would depend on how they've configured their systems. If they have one box processing the incoming signals, and another box uploading the result to their Windows Media Server, then we might overload the second box but the sound would be unchanged.

        But if the box that does the processing is the same as the one that's attempting to service all the requests from Slashdotters, it seems like it would eat up CPU cycles. That would make it more difficult to do the real-time synthesis of 20 incoming signals. I suspect that's the cause of the toneless drone I was hearing.

        Add to that the bandwidth -- do they have one pipe that's receiving 20 signals, outputting (however many) Eigenradio streams, *and* serving up the strangely-formatted web page?
        • I don't know, but recieving the signals isn't the problem, they're being pulled out of the FM spectrum. 20 radio stations. You're probably onto something with the CPU usage tho. Interesting...
        • So you're assuming that there's only a few seconds between when eigenradio "hears" something and when that sound gets used in eigenradio's own composition. My guess would be that there is actually a longer lag in between these two events.

      • I think you misunderstood. (Score:4, Funny)

        by zCyl ( 14362 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @07:29PM (#6829627)
        What makes you think that the slashdot effect changes the content of the music?

        Actually, I think what he was trying to say was something along the lines of:

        In Soviet Russia, music slashdots you.
    • Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to keep up the experience. After about a minute, the rhythms stopped, replaced by a metallic, toneless hum.

      Actually that's not uncommon even when the site isn't getting its ass handed to it. I've hit up the stream a few times before and I always get the toneless hum.

    • If only we could do this to actions movies...one hummin' explode-fest!

  • The RIAA? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mao che minh ( 611166 ) * on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:47PM (#6828811) Journal
    What does the RIAA have to say about you using their copyrighted material to generate music - music which is arguably not unique, but rather derivatives of their property?

    • Re:The RIAA? (Score:5, Funny)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:54PM (#6828899) Journal
      Bah...
      What do they have to say about using the very algorithm that they apparently use to generate much of their own music, judging from the songs being released the past decade or so?
    • I don't think Bad Boy Records will have anything bad to say about it.

    • Re:The RIAA? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) *
      Isn't there a minimum amount of copyrighted material that has to be sampled before it requires compensating the artist? So far, I haven't heard more than a ~2sec snippet of recognizable voice, so maybe it falls below the threshhold.

      Not that that would keep the RIAA's goons from filing suit. But that's alright... if they try to listen now, they'll hear a metallic buzz (if they can connect at all).
    • They'll probably subpoena the entire MIT student body via the D.C. court.

    • Re:The RIAA? (Score:3, Funny)

      by LuxFX ( 220822 )
      I think it can be argued that the algorithm that has created this music has, in a sense, encrypted the popular music it was derived from. If the RIAA can detect their copyrighted music in the newly generated music, it must mean they have circumvented that music's encryption. Say hello to the DMCA, Hillary.

      But if you don't want to go with the fire w/ fire method, you could also call the newly generated music a parody of popular music -- it is, as you said, derivatives of their property -- and protect it t

  • Suicide (Score:4, Funny)

    by neonstz ( 79215 ) * on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:47PM (#6828822) Homepage

    Somehow I don't think posting a link to a shoutcast-stream on slashdot is the smartest thing to do...

  • I can't help thinking (Score:5, Funny)

    by rritterson ( 588983 ) * on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:47PM (#6828824)
    I've been listening to the stream for 5 minutes or so now. I can't help thinking that this is what a band of R2D2's would sound like, with C3P0 in random memory access as lead vocalist.

    It's so very electronic and unnatural sounding, like nothing of this world.
  • Not quite something you can dance to, is it? I'd be interested in hearing the original music that's "just like" the Eigenradio (though I think I might prefer the Eigenradio).

  • Worst designed web site ever... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JohnGrahamCumming ( 684871 ) * <slashdotNO@SPAMjgc.org> on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:48PM (#6828833) Homepage Journal
    1. Horizontal scrolling required
    2. Tiny
    3. Virtually no links to anything
    4. Very small amount of information

    John.

  • Please... (Score:5, Funny)

    by phraktyl ( 92649 ) * <wyattNO@SPAMdraggoo.com> on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:48PM (#6828835) Homepage Journal
    For the love of god, we will give your our women and our money, but make it stop!
    • I can see money, if you're one of the few who made it past the bust with his job intact? But your women?

      The parent's promises are worse vaporware than Duke Nukem'...

      • It's a fair statement. This is Slashdot, comprised of IT workers and teenage geeks. Neither of which are known for their abilities to attract and keep women.

        I can promise to give you all the money in my bank account, but that doesn't mean you'll get rich off of it.

    • Re: Please... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @06:17PM (#6829088)


      > For the love of god, we will give your our women and our money, but make it stop!

      I notice you didn't offer your sheep.

  • So, they scan bunchies of stations to make new music.

    Now, if there was anything worth listening to on the radio, I'd say they'd have something, but hey don't because "Garbage In = Garbage Out".

    While hacking up pig snouts and horse hooves might make for an interesting, ummmm... "sausage", it's still nasty dead stuff...

    RS

  • Where are the details? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) * on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:50PM (#6828856) Homepage Journal
    I wish they had spent as much time documenting what this actually did as they spent making the website pretty, the one remotely technical diagram on the website has no explanation whatsoever as to what it is about.

    IMHO this is yet another example of how academic projects are judged by the amount of attention they attract, rather than on whether they advance the state of the art. This is the reason why people like Kevin Warrick [sundayherald.com] can stick a dog tag in their arm and go around claiming they are the world's first cyborg - all while being lavished with attention by the mainstream media.

    All of this leads to an academic system that increasingly rewards self pubicity at the expense of real reasearch.

    Oh, BTW - I listened to the radio station, it sounds like a garbled mess - I certainly couldn't determine the point of this from listening to it, but then I could say the same thing about rap.

    • Re:Where are the details? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @06:08PM (#6829027) Journal
      IMHO this is yet another example of how academic projects are judged by the amount of attention they attract, rather than on whether they advance the state of the art.

      Every Spring semester at Michigan State University's Computer Science department, the capstone class (taken by seniors to graduate) did a project and had a "poster competition" to see who did the best project.

      The team that won the year I saw them was the team that wrote a program that graphed a song's FFT over time. That's it. They went on to babble about how you can recognize a song based on how it looks, visual recognition, and it did some ill-conceived 3D stuff that, by making the song data fit into even less space on the screen, was even more impossible to see. (I think you were supposed to eventually pick the song you wanted to hear by looking at this tiny, tiny representations.... at the risk of potentially offending one of the authors, who may conceivably read this, that's stupid! If they just seriously tried it once, they'd have seen how poorly this worked.) (See here [tp.spt.fi] for an example of a guy playing around with that kind of graph; note most songs look NOTHING like that in an FFT graph. ;-) )

      The fact is, it's a neat idea but it doesn't work. All songs in a particular pretty much look alike in an FFT graph. The differences are pretty minimal. Making it smaller doesn't help at all. The program looked really cool on a poster, using one song, but use it on six or seven real songs and ask even yourself to distinguish them and you can't; you don't "see" and "hear" that way.

      IIRC a dot-com was founded based on this idea, AFAIK indepedently derived.

      What does this have to do with your post? I thought about half of the other posters deserved the prize over this project, in that they were useful, interesting, or potentially even groundbreaking, in the small way that a semester project can be. But they didn't have a Beatles song graphed out on their poster. They lose.

      Even college professors aren't immune to judging on surface appearences and glitz, rather then real value.
    • IMHO this is yet another example of how academic projects are judged by the amount of attention they attract, rather than on whether they advance the state of the art. This is the reason why people like Kevin Warrick [sundayherald.com] can stick a dog tag in their arm and go around claiming they are the world's first cyborg - all while being lavished with attention by the mainstream media.

      Step 1: Invent retarted station based on an alphabet's soup of statistical techniques that have no relevance to anythin

    • Um.. It's a joke. Get it? (Score:2, Informative)

      by monk ( 1958 )
      The diagrams aren't intended to say anything, they're eye-noise just like the music is ear-noise. You're critiquing the ketchup stains on the table.

      If you need anymore clues we're here for ya, buddy.
    • I suspect that this is just a spinoff of some research. Poke around on the MIT Media website, and you find various projects on music recognition and analysis. I'll bet this was some grad student sitting around saying "hey, we could take this thing we did and very easily make an audio stream out of it." Probably not the object of the project, just an amusing spin-off.

  • Great (Score:3, Funny)

    by tmark ( 230091 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:51PM (#6828859)
    When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it.

    But what will the RIAA do when there are no more artists ?

  • video (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bobtheheadless ( 467304 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:52PM (#6828874) Homepage
    I wonder if you can do the same thing with video... hm.

  • Re: Statistically Optimal Music (Score:3, Funny)

    by justforaday ( 560408 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:52PM (#6828875)
    One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio.

    i'm trying to tune in but i'm not hearing anything...i'd say that makes it better than old radio...

  • Alright Bastards... (Score:5, Funny)

    by DAQ42 ( 210845 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:52PM (#6828879)
    Get off those links. Some of us actually listen to this on a regular basis (or rather, all day at work) and it helps us be more productive. Give me back my noise please. I can't get anything done without it...
  • Its another MIT project on slashdot.
    That makes approximately 25 thousand this week. [slashdot.org]
    Time for an icon?
    • And what /. fails to appreciate is the fact that in the "real world" (defined as everywhere else, including other universities), nobody cares that much about the BS that MIT's putting out. Especially things like this.

      Putting the name "MIT" on it gets funding, but that doesn't make it useful.
  • I really would love to hear it; sounds really neat. However, "The streaming server cannot accept any more connections at this time."

    D'oh! And it sounded so cool, too!

  • Too many notes (Score:5, Funny)

    by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:55PM (#6828916)
    Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy ... One song on Eigenradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio.

    Reader's Digest comes to music.

  • Two suggestions... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:55PM (#6828918) Journal
    Beat and pitch.

    Make the derivative "music" at least try to keep these consistant, or at least slowly varying. If you can do that, this might work well.

  • Creativity (Score:2, Insightful)

    by worm eater ( 697149 )
    Interesting that a bank of computers replicating human music can be so much more interesting than humans trying to replicate human music. I guess they have have a long way to go before they can make music as boring as most major record labels. "It's a feature, not a bug."

  • wonderful organized noise is good for you. try it! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by linuxbaby ( 124641 ) * on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:56PM (#6828926)
    The first time I heard "noise" music like this, I was flipping around radio stations while driving down a highway. It all seemed like the same old 4-minute song with verse, chorus, verse, chorus, songs about love, 4/4 beats, major/minor keys, guitar-keys-bass-drums-vocals.

    And then... hit a college station playing this noise!

    What a refreshment! What a way to cleanse the pallette. No chords. No lyrics. No beats. No guitars. Nothing recognizable at all! Just wonderful organized noise.

    Then after listening to a LOT of it, especially the stuff that you know was actually composed by a human, something new happens:

    You start to listen to the world around you (traffic, nature, conversations) as if it was composed. Imagining a single intention behind the noise of the world. It really is a beautiful mindset. See the restaurant scene in the movie "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould." http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0108328/ [imdb.com]

    If you haven't spent a lot of time with music like this, try it. If you hate it after 5 minutes, listen for 10. If you hate it after 10, listen for 20. Try to appreciate it.

    --
    Derek Sivers, CD Baby
    http://www.cdbaby.com [cdbaby.com]

    • You start to listen to the world around you (traffic, nature, conversations) as if it was composed.
      Yes, that's John Cage's premise to his "music" as well.

    • John Cage (Score:2, Informative)

      by chocolatetrumpet ( 73058 )
      Those of you enjoying these ideas might want to check out John Cage's wonderful video, I have nothing to say and I am saying it. [amazon.com]

      John Cage was a revolutionary philosopher-artist-composer with some good ideas on how to be happy :-) In many ways he has incorporated Eastern thinking into Western arts.
    • If you haven't spent a lot of time with music like this, try it. If you hate it after 5 minutes, listen for 10. If you hate it after 10, listen for 20. Try to appreciate it.

      Uh, why? I checked eigenradio out a week or two back and, in addition to being boring as hell, it was physically painful to listen to. But I made myself stick with it for a bit, in an attempt to see what was so wonderful about it. I failed miserably.

      So, would you care to go beyond your admonition to "try to appreciate it" and tell

    • Re:wonderful organized noise is good for you. try (Score:4, Insightful)

      by skintigh2 ( 456496 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @06:36PM (#6829251)
      I think you just defined ambient music.

      John Cage
    • Aphex Twin's music has done this for me. At first it just sounds like crappy noise randomly generated, but then you just "get it"...

      Aphex Twin's music spans all forms of electronic music, Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 is an incredibly WONDERFUL bedtime album, while Drukqs is a great album while working... There's something about the almost chaotic aspect of it that keeps my mind focused.

      It's tough to go back to listening to mainstream radio after experiencing music that changes a person's perspective.

  • Yuck! (Score:2, Funny)

    by acousticiris ( 656375 ) *
    I don't know what radio stations they are sampling, but after a few minutes of listening it sounded like a bunch of "pop-tart" music strewn together being blasted over AM radio...
    I used to always joke that you could take all of the Spear Britney albums and--if mixed properly--you could make one long song that didn't change themes, tones or melody once...I'm thinking this is one step closer to proving that theory.... Maybe it was just the time I tuned in--who knows?
    There is one thing I find curious though, w

  • Familiar... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tunabomber ( 259585 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:58PM (#6828944) Homepage
    Kinda reminds me of that "Super Recipe" generator I engineered in my lair beneath the Pacific Ocean a few weeks ago. It makes super recipes based on good recipes that you input into it. I like ice cream and filet mignon, so the generator created a filet cream recipe that was supposed to be super but was terrible.
    Blast!

  • Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Squidgee ( 565373 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:58PM (#6828945)
    Wow, this [mit.edu] really cleared up how this works for me! Thanks for such a clear, informative diagram!
    • They missed the essential step that makes it work. I'm probably violating the DMCA by revealing it, but here goes:

      "And then, magic happens. Some math may be involved as well."

      Catch me if you can!

    • Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)

      by hyfe ( 641811 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @08:46PM (#6830083)
      Actually..

      PCA = Principal Component Analyses.. in essence it draws reduces the number of variables in a dataset by making up totally new ones... so in essence its just a simplification of their input.

      As to what the others are, I'm sure there are somebody here with more than my extremely meager signal processing knowledge:

      ACB = No clue
      DTW = Dynamic Time Warping
      NMF = Non-negative Matrix Factorization

  • Mirror - server's full (Score:5, Funny)

    by GMFTatsujin ( 239569 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @05:59PM (#6828947) Homepage
    100101011 010110101 000101010 1110010101
    100010101 010001010 101011010 1001010001
    001010101 101010001 010110001 0101010010....
    • I detected a checksum error in your stream. I think this is the last sequence of bits sent by the server:

      01101111 01101000 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01110011 01101100 01100001 01110011 01101000 01100100 01101111 01110100 00100001

      This link [nickciske.com] may be helpful.
  • If you listen carefully, you can hear the server whimper as it slowly melts under a slashdotting.
  • That was the sound of the slashdotting of a shoutcast stream.
  • Sounds like a garage band tuning their instruments while their was some strange feedback being picked up in the background. It's horrid, it should filter out high pitched buzz noises and other things like that. And it should make some system of rythem, it's like random chunks of crap mixed into one big random chunk of crap.
  • I wonder why they chose to name it "Eigenradio"? Eigen being a German word, it seems that the primary meaning is "to own." [www.dict.cc] Really makes me wonder what kind of statement they are trying to make. Of course it seems obvious to me that the main point of this project (outside of the technical challenge presented) is to make some sort of statement regarding the music industry.

    • Re:Interesting name... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Ever heard of an Eigenvector?

      eigenvector

      A vector which, when acted on by a particular
      linear transformation, produces a scalar multiple of the
      original vector. The scalar in question is called the
      eigenvalue corresponding to this eigenvector.

      It should be noted that "vector" here means "element of a
      vector space" which can include many mathematical entities.
      Ordinary vectors are elements of a vector space, and
      multiplication by a matrix is a linear transformation on
      them; smooth functions "are vectors", and ma

    • Re:Interesting name... (Score:5, Informative)

      by adrianbaugh ( 696007 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @06:23PM (#6829139) Homepage Journal
      Eigen is a fairly well-established prefix in quantum mechanics (eigenvalues, eigenvectors, eigenstates etc.) An eigenstate is one of an infinite set of orthogonal solutions to a set of equations, an eigenvalue is a unique value (often energy) corresponding to a particular eigenstate. Thus I suspect in this case the term is supposed to mean something like "unique radio", which seems at least reasonably appropriate, if rather skewed. I suspect you're wrong about it being a comment on the state of the music industry, at least primarily. It seems like they're just using radio stations as a source of material 'cos it happens to be readily available. 'Course, the fact that it can't be much /worse/ than commercial radio is pretty ironic ;-)

      • Re:Interesting name... (Score:5, Informative)

        by phliar ( 87116 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @07:03PM (#6829444) Homepage
        "Eigen" in german means "essence of", "characteristic", "similar" etc. The term comes from linear algebra, not quantum mechanics. If x is a vector and A is an operator, and A x (A applied to x) has the same direction as x, then x is an eigenvector of A. For example, if the operation is "reflect in the xy plane", then any vector parallel to the z-axis is an eigenvector of the operator. The scalar that x gets scaled by is called its eigenvalue. For the reflection operator, -1 is the eigenvalue for any eigenvector. QM extended this concept to other objects like states.

        So the term eigenmusic could be used to describe the underlying defining characteristic of a music. You could say that all Britney Spears' music has the same eigenmusic.

    • In line with what others have said in reply to this comment, they have probably done something akin to eigenvalue analysis. This math is stuff that's on the edge of my comprehension, but I bet they are taking a bunch of songs and extracting the time series that "best represents" all of the songs. Umm... basis functions... err principal components... something like that. I need to go study now...

  • kittens with mittens? (Score:5, Funny)

    by mystik ( 38627 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @06:10PM (#6829038) Homepage Journal
    <meta name="keywords" content="eigenradio, eigen, radio, non-negative matrix factorization, pca, ica, dwt, singular values, machine listening, whitman, brian, media, lab,
    kittens with mittens">

    anyone look at the page source?

    I bet this is how they Really make the music ...

  • "The requested server is full."

  • Peercast to avoid the Slashdotting? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kaimelar ( 121741 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @06:12PM (#6829049) Homepage
    This idea has sparked my interest, but the streams are most definately Slashdotted. Would it be possible for someone who has the stream to use Peercast to help take some of the burden off the server?

  • Why do I get the notion (Score:4, Interesting)

    by John Zebedee ( 659358 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @06:12PM (#6829053)
    ... that this site is a wonderfully clever troll? Once you get past the notion that anyone could possibly be serious about Eigenmusic, satire is all that makes sense. A tip of the hat to the creators!
  • It would be interesting to hear the differences in "statistically optimal" music produced as a result of correlating different genres of music.

    E.g., would people who only listened to Rock be more inclined to like the output of this program if its input was limited to Rock music? Could it create an "optimal" song?

  • GIGO (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Equuleus42 ( 723 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @06:16PM (#6829080) Homepage
    What you hear on Eigenradio is the best of the New Music, distilled and de-correlated.
    One important thing I learned in my statistics classes was "Garbage In, Garbage Out", essentially that any system which is fed garbage will produce garbage as its result... Given that most new music is garbage, won't this merely produce garbage as its output?
  • Taking all this, mixing it together in a big bowl, does not make something resembling the components, or even anything very appealing.

    Well, neither does this.

  • For others unable to listen to eigenradio because of the slashdot effect. I recommend groove salad until things calm down:

    www.somafm.com [somafm.com]
    128k [somafm.com]
    56k [somafm.com]
    24k [somafm.com]

    The DJ, Rusty Hodge, had an interview [slashdot.org] with slashdot a while back.
    enjoy

    -metric

  • Hrm (Score:2)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 )
    I think from the dead webserver they are now playing a very literal version of Simon and Garfunkel's The Sounds of Silence - because I can't hear a damn thing!
  • I find this drive for computer generated artificial music unnecessary. Why bother, when we have airwaves full of _equally_ uninspired, artifical music such as Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera.

    Besides, it seems like this process of Musical distillation, of which the story speaks, has brought us these "talents" in the first place!

  • Too Late (Score:2, Funny)

    by cheesee ( 97693 )
    When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Too late Eigenradio. The music industry has been doing this for years.
  • I highly doubt that you can derive optimal music from music that is played on the radio...

  • symphony? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Mr Coffee Cup ( 182394 )
    'makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. Since we listen to so much music all the time, Eigenradio is always on and always live.'

    That's all well and good, but what if more than half of those stations happen to be playing music that sucks? (even good stations use filler too..)
  • I've managed to get a mirror up; http://64.5.58.149:81/ in your music player of choice should work, as long as I don't lose my connection to the main stream...

    Enjoy!

  • Glimpse of the future? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kassiopeia ( 671060 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @08:37PM (#6830017)

    I'm slightly scared. This is a technological curiosity of its own might, granted, but this prompts me to envision a rather gloom future. Originally I've thought that the rise of networking would eliminate the entire corporate structure involved in music-making and be replaced with system where everyone can give a go at composing, publish their work online and where the best artists could probably managed to make quite a fortune with voluntary donations.

    However, could record companies do the ultimate thing, a la Nineteen Eighty-Four, and create a computer program that produces the music most of us want to hear? Would that mean the end of human creativity on that level of play, or would this algorithm be doomed to failure? It might only take a few years to adjust, and you'd end up liking it.

    Of course, a prudent question is, if music can be replicated so easily, what's the point in appreaciating it any longer, as it's clearly something even machines can do well...

    Next up: television series writing machines. But, oh wait, we already have reality tv...

    • Computers writing music will never happen. At some level, it will always be people using computers as tools to write music. But we have that already (ie Mixing of music).

      First off, this is a single aleotoric (sp?) composition that is extremely similar to John Cage's 'radio symphony' produced a while ago (I don't remember the date or the exact title, but I'm sure someone will correct (or flame) me about it :-)) What classifies this as a music composition? It makes a number of algorithmic choices to crea

  • common base for musical taste? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ratfynk ( 456467 ) on Friday August 29, 2003 @09:08PM (#6830209) Journal
    So if you listen to modern Turkish in 7/4 and a 4 beat rock. Though in a little Jamaica and you will get Garth Brooks? Whenever you try to quantify music to find the ultimate groove you will get the ultimate in mediocre shlock. I once really tried to listen to an ultra post modern new music concert. The host stated that the music was written in a post modern a-tonal non serial fashion and was a-rythmic generated chance. The composer had then orchestrated some of the results. After really giving the music full attention and every chance to do something for me, I came to the conclusion that the result was decidedly A MUSICAL. I also came to the conclusion that the school of music that this composer was associated with was filled with air heads behind desks that most likely gave up actually playing real musical instruments after graduating from where ever. The musicians in the Orchestra gave it their best shot, which was rather sad. The applause was perfunctory so the lack of an encore was very much appreciated. If the composer/conductor had prepared one it will just have to wait.

    Statistical analysis is just not the way to write music, except perhaps for tone deaf nerds, and record execs. You have every right to play whatever form of music you choose. I have every right to listen to something else! If it got groove I do not care. I have never heard any computer generated music that can even come close to a great composer or musician, the differences are obvious. What appeals to the audiance is never the way to write music. It is how to please record companies, but is artless garbage that is as quickly forgotten as fast as it is created.

  • cute, but trivial application of PCA (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mooface ( 674033 ) on Saturday August 30, 2003 @12:14AM (#6831090)
    Anyone who takes an intermediate signal processing class learns about Princ. Component Analysis (PCA). Loosely, it attempts to represent a set of signals as weighted, linear combinations of sub-signals..... The technique allows you to find the pieces of signal that are common to the overall set. In this case I'm sure they are lining up some radio feeds, performing PCA, doing a little trivial stuff to it, and synthesizing their own "music" based on some transformation of the PCA weights and computed vectors. Not a big deal -- more like a one afternoon project for a grad student, or maybe a class project for a few undergrads...

  • Ring Mod? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gidds ( 56397 ) <[ku.em.sddig] [ta] [todhsals]> on Saturday August 30, 2003 @08:47AM (#6832345) Homepage
    Does anyone else find that sort of metallic noise familiar? It sounds uncannily like the effect of an audio processor called a ring modulator - also known as a multiplier. What's the betting they're just multiplying together all the inputs?

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