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Music Media Science

Swarm Theory Applied to Music 26

Posted by timothy from the fire-ants dept.
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."
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Swarm Theory Applied to Music More

Swarm Theory Applied to Music

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  • Quantification of Determinism in Music (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @04:46PM (#5546956)
    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? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by manual_overide ( 134872 )
    All I found were real audio files.

    • Re:MP3? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jpsst34 ( 582349 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @05:00PM (#5547052) Journal
      You have to look for the (mp3).wav file. (I don't get it, either.)

      • Re:MP3? (Score:3, Informative)

        by divbyzero ( 23176 )
        I can explain the concept of MP3 in a WAV file.

        MPEG Layer 3 Audio is fundamentally a compression algorithm, not a file format. While it is most often used with the particular set of headers and packaging that make up an "MP3" file, it does not have to be.

        Microsoft WAV files can contain audio in any of several dozen different formats. The most common format is uncompressed "PCM" audio, but by setting the right flags in the header, various compression schemes can be used instead. One of the more recent c

        • Re:MP3? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Yokaze ( 70883 )
          A minor correction: Mpeg Audio 1 Layer 3 is a encoding scheme, not a compression algorithm. It may tightly coupled with the compression scheme, but it is not bound by it.
          From the MPEG 1 Audio FAQ [uni-hannover.de]

          It does not standardize the encoder, but rather standardizes the type of information that an encoder has to produce and write to an MPEG-1 conformant bitstream as well as the way in which the decoder has to parse, decompress, and resynthesize this information in order to regain the encoded sound.

          That is, why th

  • Douglas Adams would be proud! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hdurdle ( 199425 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @04:54PM (#5547010) Homepage
    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.

  • Similar Project (Score:5, Informative)

    by mattlary ( 595947 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @05:00PM (#5547053) Homepage Journal
    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

    • Re:Similar Project (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mivok ( 621790 )
      Wow.. that sounds amazing, especially considering its computer generated. So now I have to tell everyone that a computer can not only beat me at board games, but it can improvise better than I can as well :(

      Admittedly, jazz is a lot more random than other styles, and the chords for some (all?) of the songs were predetermined, but still, its the first computer generated music I've heard that didnt sound 'weird', unlike the ones from the toplevel article here, parts of which sound like they would make really
  • 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? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Spudley ( 171066 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @05:18PM (#5547172) Homepage Journal
    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.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Goldsmith ( 561202 ) on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @05:49PM (#5547446)
    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.
  • 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 (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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,

  • 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!
  • 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 slow

  • 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...

  • 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

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