Swarm Theory Applied to Music

JoeCotellese writes "There is an article in Discover magazine about computer scientist/musician Tim Blackwell and his Swarm Music software. This software creates improvisational music based on models of swarming and flocking. The observation was made that interaction among musicians is interdependent and yet independent and this dynamic parallels flock dynamics. Computer generated music has been around for a while but according to his web site, this project was the first application of swarm theory to music. Sample MP3s are available on his website."

Quantification of Determinism in Music

It would be interesting to analyze this new music using iterated function systems as described in the seminal work by Meloon and Sprott [wisc.edu]. The method characterises the organization of the music which may, or may not, occur in this new music generated by 'flock theory'.

MP3?

All I found were real audio files.

Re:MP3?

You have to look for the (mp3).wav file. (I don't get it, either.)

Douglas Adams would be proud!

Fantastic! The main character in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" [amazon.co.uk], Richard MacDuff, is a programmer whose current project is converting numerical data into sounds. He discusses this in some mathematical detail at times. And MacDuff has written an article on the relationship between music, mathematics, and beauty, and which gets quoted extensively.

Re:Douglas Adams would be proud!

He discusses this in some mathematical detail at times.

he specifically mentions the conversion of a flock of birds to sounds ... :-)

On a side note... that link should goto: http://www.iblist.com/book.php?id=252
here?

SUPPORT THE INTERNET BOOK LIST! SUBMIT A BOOK! :-)

Similar Project

Al Biles [rit.edu] from RIT has been working with genetic algorithms to do jazz solos.
Here's a link to information on his genetic algorithm, GenJam [rit.edu].

-Matt

I'm not not licking toads!

I wouldn't want to let anyone listen to this while on acid. It reminds me of that time in that movie, "The Bear," when the bear either ate some mushrooms or a toad or something then had a funky dream.

what is music?

Unfortunately, the definition of music versus noise is subject to the opinion of the listener. I don't think I'm going to be listening to a CD of swarming violins, bleeps, bloops, and marimbas anytime soon. However, I do detect structure and 'following' in the audio clips. If some concrete theme could be established we might actually have a winner.

but is it music?

Good grief. That was the strangest set of sounds I've heard a computer make since I tried playing around with the POKE command too close to the C64s audio addresses.

No one has mentioned....

No one has mentioned "Flight of the Bumblebee" yet? Precedent has been established in the union of swarm and music.

UCSD's modern music department

UCSD's music department offers an undergraduate computer music class. I took the class and we did some swarm based music. In fact, as a final project in the class, I wrote a program to produce music based on fusion plasma simulations in a tokamak (my job at the time), which contains similar algorythms.

These are not especially new ideas.

Sounds like...

I listened to the audio and found the music to be loosely structured with a unique interpretation of rhythm and an interesting take on the importance of melody and harmony. In other words, IT SOUNDS LIKE CRAP!!!

Musical structure

Blackwell and Bentley decided to translate the language of music into a 3-D space, with a dimension each for pitch, duration, and volume

I humbly propose that this is an overly simplified way of looking at music. It may be that the reporter missed the significant details of the project, and I freely admit that my experience (and interest) in jazz music is awfully limited, but still, I claim that music must be more than this. There are well established features of music not even hinted at in the article, like repetition of small themes or larger parts of the music, or balancing the features in the beginning of the piece against those at the end. Even simple harmonic progressions sound unlikely to emerge from this system.

Just because it's sound, doesn't mean it's music!

It's amazing what qualifies as "music" these days. There was no flow and it was too discordant to considered music im my opinion. I would rather listen to thrash metal!

Evolutionary Music

I wrote a program some years back that would generate midi files and 3d images from a kind of L-system deal where the L-systems were built using a variant of genetic algorithms/programming. It wasn't very flexible so I rewrote it in java and had it available on my web pages at the university (or whatever it was) where I worked.

It produced some horrible noises and a few amazing ones. It produced some dull images and a few astonishing ones.

I don't have web space for it at the moment and have been slowly (its now my third or fourth pass so I'm getting a bit tired of it) working on the code to make it cleaner and add some more flexibility in terms of the kind of problem it will solve. In particular I'd like to make it possible to run more easily as a web page and to make it possible for downloaded versions to load good "genes" up to the web page. I suspect that will help to make the resulting music/images more interesting.

Once I have a decent version that I don't mind having other people look at, I'll be putting it on some open source site (like sourceforge).

Harkens back to Forbidden Planet...

Sounds like the Krelb music they played, except that this must be the amateur section (or instrument tuning)...

Sounds like the swarm bots are not communicating amongst themselves...

Might find a use in tranquility

Alternatively, perhaps it could learn a thing or two from the related work already done in tranquility [tqworld.com]. From the tranquility website (see introduction -> technology):

The audio composer is named JukeBox. It is the task of JukeBox to create a pleasing song to go with a particular game. JukeBox is an AI that has a rudimentary understanding of musical rules. It also understands what audio samples are available to it. JukeBox first creates a particular tune. It will then look at the available instruments and will assign them to the various tracks based not only on the tempo of the tracks, but also on how the instruments combine (it knows that not all instruments sound good together, and that an instrument that sounds good at one tempo or pitch, may not sound good at a different tempo or pitch).

JukeBox also understands how to underdrive and overdrive some of the sounds to produce special effects. It works these effects into some songs based on what it thinks will sound pleasing.

Additionally, JukeBox assigns sounds to the platforms and spinners that augment and "fit" the basic soundtrack.