Automatic Christmas Music

crispinalt writes "Just in time for the holiday season, Brian Whitman, the creator of Eigenradio, has had his computers compose the 'statistically optimal' Christmas music in A Singular Christmas, a freely downloadable MP3 album. A bank of computers listened to as much Christmas music as they could handle, and then learned their own true meaning of holiday cheer. Enjoy!"

Well... you can hear something.

[Quebec]

I listened to it and well...

it's a bit creepy, although it could reflect how I sometimes feel in the middle of the Christmas rush.

Grr

[bigberk]

More Christmas music? No thanks. I was hanging out at the liquor store yesterday (hooray for holiday wine) and was talking to some of the store employees. Although I insisted they shut off that fscking music, they said in fact it's piped in from head office. This seems to be the case with many stores these days; Christmas music is just piped in. Apparently it has a positive effect on sales, as people have been trained to associate Christmas music with opening their wallets.

It aint about religion, boy, it's about $$.

Re:I'm waiting for missing track #17 - Silent nigh

[a_timid_mouse]

Only if the 2:34 is an exact subset, or sample, of the complete 4:33 work, right? Otherwise, it could be a completely different composition of rests of different lengths than the 4:33 work. :-)

And at the other end of the scale...

[StressGuy]

has to be Barbera Streisand's frenetic in-your-face version of Jingle Bells that always makes my eyeballs bleed whenever I hear it. ....but your taste may vary...

Most Wanted/Unwanted Songs

[jonesvery]

Reminds me of the Most Wanted Song / Most Unwanted Song [diacenter.org] project that Komar & Melamid did in conjunction with Dave Soldier. Based on survey responses, they created songs that (statistically speaking, of course) should appeal to 72 +/- 12% of listeners (most popular), and one that would appeal to fewer than 200 people in the entire world (least popular).

And no, they really didn't take it that seriously , they knew that their sampling and control methods weren't all that strict, and were aware that the resulting music isn't likely to actually generate responses that meet the projected stats. :)

Komar and Melamid also did a "most wanted painting [diacenter.org]" project, which has the actual survey results and resulting paintings available online.

I've studied music!

[scottblascocomposer]

Actually, its fantastically difficult (if not impossible) to write good or interesting music without using dissonant chords! Dissonances are necessary to make a harmonic progression interesting, whether they are dissonances between harmonies, or within them.

Um, let's see, what else? Ah, the tritone (augmented 4th/diminished 5th) was the Devil's tone, and it was in fact essentially verboten for some time, but has certainly been in wide use both in and out of the church for the last 300 years at least. Oh, and Mozart wrote a string quartet which was dubbed "Dissonances" that very successfully makes dissonant harmonies a fundamental part of it's materials.

I'm a pretty competent musician, a composer no less, and I couldn't imagine keeping a musical line interesting without the use of dissonance at some level--it really is not feasible. Its like trying to discern depth without light and shadows... contrastless mush.

Re:NO MORE CHRISTMAS MUSIC!

[technomom]

I'm amazed that after all these years, A Charlie Brown Christmas is still on the air. Even if the advertisers are cynical, at least the show has some heart left.

It is the only "Holiday" special on broadcast television I know of that quotes from Luke's gospel on the subject of Christmas.

JoAnn

Re:NO MORE CHRISTMAS MUSIC!

[Anonymous Cowtard]

And, according to the Wikipedia entry on the Christmas special [wikipedia.org], it was actually sorta commerialized in nature to begin with:

"However, the special has not been seen in its original, uncut form since its original telecast in 1965. The opening and closing credits contain references to Coca-Cola, the show's original sponsor (the main titles have Linus and Snoopy crashing into a Coca-Cola sign, while the final end credit mentions "Merry Christmas from your local Coca-Cola bottler"). Years later, the FCC imposed sanctions preventing sponsor references in the context of a story (especially children's programming), which is why these elements (as well as several seconds of other footage) have not been seen lately on television, even on home video."

I've never heard that before, so I'm not guaranteeing that someone hasn't imparted their own imagined occurence to Wikipedia.

Re:have any of you actually studied music?

[gujju]

I saw an episode of MythBusters where they play different types of music to plants and test how it affected their growth, Heavy Metal beat classical music in increasing the yield in Pea plants.
This brings about the question whether heavy metal is more atonnal than classical music.
Food for thought....

Adhish

Re:have any of you actually studied music?

[ostrich2]

My hypothesis is that the computers account for the similarities in any carol by eliminating common chords. The remainder must be the stuff that differentiates a good song from a bad one. I believe this is a bad way to go about deciding what good music is, exactly because we want to hear those chords that are similar, but we also want to hear movement in music, which requires dissonance.

Think of a search engine: if you're indexing 1000 pages that all have the word "purple" in them, then your engine is probably going to ignore "purple" when deciding what is important about each document.

Re:Charlie Brown Christmas and advertisers

[Anonymous Coward]

Me, too. It was the oddest thing -- they didn't sell Dolly Madison products in any of the stores in my region, so the only time I ever heard of them was in connection with the Charlie Brown specials.
I always wondered, "Is that a real product? Where do they come from?"
I never even wanted to try to find them, it just made it seem like the programs had been beamed in from an alternate reality or something.

Re:I've studied music!

[scottblascocomposer]

And even though 7th (and other extended) chords seem to be mostly associated with Jazz, the dominant and fully diminished 7ths are ubiquitous in the cadences of 18th and 19th century music and beyond.

Many people don't realize that Bach's works have 7th chords sprinkled all over them in all kinds of forms.

Sci Fi horror music

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I like it. If you play bright reindeer cap softly it actually sounds like the soundtrack of a very scary movie. Just at the part where the monster is sneaking up on the girl, or maybe where the girl is about to discover she is the monster. Maybe even when we all discover Christmas has become totally commercialized and evil, and that Wal-Mart is destroying all businesses it comes into contact with to give up cheap prices.