Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 712

CAs make music - http://tones.wolfram.com/

We've been working on this for quite some time and haven't been able to talk about it much, before this release. Now that our website is live, we can talk a lot more about what we've been doing to use NKS to make music.

I encourage forum members to check it out, and feedback here is welcome. Play with it to find something you like, and experiment to the composition controls. I also encourage you to share URLs of some of the compositions you find. Here are a few that I found -

A few piano, some rock (that would sound better with real guitars not midi ones - see below), some zen-ee eastern, and various pop attempts -

http://tones.wolfram.com/xid/3627-006-3916-901-6423

Using the site to look for baselines, for punk or hop -

http://tones.wolfram.com/xid/7776-473-5601-705-7874

Attached is a zip file of three sample songs, as a sort of "coming attractions". One is a midi I made with an ealier version of the Mathematica software package that powers the site, with a few structure tricks added. The others are mp3 files found on the site "as is", to show the kind of sound quality you can get when you go beyond the polyphonic midi limit and the sound samples in a typical computer's synth wave-table. One was found by Peter Overmann and the other by Joshua Martell.

Have fun...

Attachment: musicsamples.zip
This has been downloaded 1646 time(s).

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Registered: Jun 2005
Posts: 39

If you search my posts you will find that I predicted you would make music with CA's, because that's what I use them for...since 1981. I think you'll also find links to examples.

It's interesting because I did it when I was a child younger than 13 years old who thought synthesizers were radios with brains that made up music.

A good thing to have to avoid the CopyFight!

It's public domain, and of course, nothing is
more open source than kids programming
in BASIC! This one had 26 bytes of machine
language in a DATA statement too.

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Registered: Jun 2005
Posts: 39

oops.The 1981 audiovisualization video of a CA by the BASIC program is 11 Megs long and I don't have a place to put it now. It may soon appear at:
http://sounds.virand.com

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Last edited by Val Smith on 09-14-2005 at 12:15 AM

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Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 712

Here are some links about the history of algorithmic music -

http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/~blackrse/algorithm.html

http://www.sun.rhbnc.ac.uk/Music/Ar...rts/burns2.html

http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~wowem...eamhistory.html

Here are a few about music from CAs, in particular -

http://jmge.net/camusic.htm
http://www.automatous-monk.com/
http://website.lineone.net/~edandalex/camus.htm
http://comp.uark.edu/~dmillen/cam.html
http://x2.i-dat.org/~csem/UNESCO/9/
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconVal...6/algorith.html
http://www.uboeschenstein.ch/music/...MPOSITIONS.html

Some resources on music with Mathematica from our Infocenter -

http://library.wolfram.com/infocent...ect/Arts/Music/

And some people we know who are interested in and working on algorithmic music, or did so in their younger days -

Katarina Miljkovic

http://www.newenglandconservatory.e...miljkovicK.html

John Kiehl

http://www.soundtrackboston.com/

Paul Burdick

http://www.newenglandconservatory.e...y/burdickP.html

Paul Reiners

http://www.automatous-monk.com/

Maurice Methot

http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/m/...ce/maurice.html

Sever Tipei

http://ems.music.uiuc.edu/people/tipei/

Eduardo Miranda

http://neuromusic.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/

Tommasso Bolognesi (has other interests these days)

http://www1.isti.cnr.it/~bolognesi/

Ray Kurzweil (likewise)

http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html

And of course, our own Peter Overmann at Wolfram Research.

It is a fun topic that has interested lots of bright people over the years. We think we've done some pretty good work on it, and hope it spurs additional progress in the whole area.

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Registered: Apr 2006
Posts: 6

This may interest you:

http://www.synestesia.fi

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Registered: Apr 2006
Posts: 17

but this is not cellular automata related.

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Registered: Apr 2006
Posts: 6

It is not limited to cellular automata:

http://www.kolumbus.fi/lauri.grohn/musitives/2002.html

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Registered: Apr 2006
Posts: 17

Very boring. And very bad taste.

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Registered: Apr 2006
Posts: 6

Originally posted by mohammed1
Very boring. And very bad taste.

Last edited by Lauri Gröhn on 05-02-2006 at 04:06 AM

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Registered: Apr 2006
Posts: 17

Originally posted by Lauri Gröhn
Yes. Cell Automata music is very boring as are those Cell Automata pictures, also.

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Registered: Aug 2006
Posts: 1

It reminds me a casio keyboard. I guess it works for a science project recording studio, although it doesn't exactly send shivers down my spine.



Recording Studios from around the world.

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Last edited by itsdonny on 08-01-2006 at 07:42 AM

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Registered: Jun 2006
Posts: 19

Both disappointment and pleasant surprise are bound to be experienced by anyone who has mined the compuational universe with Wolfram Tones. I think it all has to do with the Principle of Computational Equivalence, one of the main tenets of which is that any system whose behavior is not manifestedly simple is computationally equivalent to any other system whose behavior is even slightly complex. The fact that there are so many musically meaningful simple programs in the computational universe might be considered empirical support for the Principle of Computational Equivalence. Some "tones" sound like something a minimalist composer thought up after an LSD flashback, but most are musically pleasing.

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Registered: Apr 2006
Posts: 6

" The fact that there are so many musically meaningful simple programs ..."

There are not so many for algorithmic composing. But his text might interest you anyway:

http://www.synestesia.fi/method/sat06.html

LG

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Registered: Jun 2006
Posts: 19

I've always been interested in the similarities and differences between music and speech. I never really thought that one could take such a Chomskyan approach to it as you did in your paper. So, if I am correct, algorithmic music has a grammar (the rules) and language (the evolution of the program). What exactly is it that takes semantics out of the picture? (figuratively and literally)

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Registered: Apr 2006
Posts: 6

Originally posted by Garrett Neske
What exactly is it that takes semantics out of the picture? (figuratively and literally)

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