Intelligent MIDI Sequencing with Hamster Control 245
An anonymous reader writes "Levy Lorenzo managed to build a MIDI sequencer that is powered and operated by hamsters. The hamsters work in teams of two to control melody and rhythm, and Markov chains are used to modify the hamster-based inputs. The sample MP3 sounds pretty good." From the article: "The MIDI sequencer intelligently produced melodies by manipulating the musical elements of rhythm and note-choice. Guided by inputs based on hamster movements, Markov chains were used to perform such beat and note computations. In culmination, 3 simultaneous voices were produced spanning 3 octaves and 3 rhythmic tiers."
Re:Powered you say? (Score:1, Informative)
Dupe!! (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about hampster controlled midi sequencers, but our editors apear to be hampsters
Something very similar from years ago (Score:1, Informative)
MIDI (Score:5, Informative)
Where are all the diminished 7ths! (Score:3, Informative)
We want a key centre/s, proper cadences, augmented/diminished triads and whatnot, interesting melodies, and groovy bass lines! Oh and more of the 12 notes please.
More importantly, were the hamsters tortured with the very music they were 'creating'? I kinda feel sorry for them
Buggy MIDI drivers (Score:4, Informative)
When I was in college from 1999 to 2003, I heard my compositions through the speakers of several brands of laptop computers. Many of these had buggy MIDI drivers that would do Weird Shit(tm) to pitch bends. I had to switch to S3M, a tracked music format similar to the MOD format popular on Amiga computers (or to a MIDI plus a sound bank), to get music to sound decent on every machine.
Re:A Dupe... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Informative)
this is the original!
http://www.webhamster.com/
I'm glad at least someone is keeping this infinite annoyance alive... wait... what am I saying???
Wow... (Score:3, Informative)
There's gotta be some might big bandwidth here. Of course, it IS cornell.
Re:A "Land" of great projects... (Score:2, Informative)
The way that the hamsters control the music is fairly random over a short time. The tone and rhythm is controlled by an individual hamster, with more or less variation based upon where the hamster is standing in its cage (in terms of left and right). This variation is then inputed as a probability distribution in a Markov transition matrix. At any given moment, the hamster's position will be fairly arbitrary. Over long periods of time, however, patterns will develop, based upon where the food is, where the hamster likes to sleep, etc. These long term patterns which have periods of random activity in the middle would create more interesting music, in my opinion. This two minute jig from two minutes of activity sounds fairly random. But if he had crated a two minute jig from two weeks of activity, the music would have possibly been more elegant.
As noted, another issue is the use of a pentatonic scale. For those who are not musically inclined, but wish to be, pentatonic instruments such as Native American Flutes [woodlandvoices.com] [woodlandvoices.com] make beautiful music very easily. (Full disclosure, my friend is the maker of the flutes I linked to, but there are many other options out there).
Hamster Project: Symbiotic Exchange... (Score:4, Informative)
Hamster [www.bfnm.de] project shows a symbiotic exchange of hoarded energy in aiming to establish a symbiosis between a population of hamsters and a group of vehicles with intelligent steering units. It is a documentation about the development of the project. There are photographs and a few streaming Real [real.com] videos. The installation was part of the "Cyberarts 1999"-exhibition in the "OK- Museum of Contemporary Art" during the "Ars Electronica 1999/ Life Science"-Festival [www.aec.at] in Linz/Austria (September 4-18).
Re:A true test is to compare it to random music. (Score:5, Informative)
The Markov chain-based note selector simply takes the current note and chooses among neighboring consonant (i.e. sounds good) notes, so you won't hear anything that sounds really awful.
The reason why this sounds so much better than other "random" or fractal compositions you might have heard is because the others effectively choose from any note on the chromatic scale and thus pull dissonant (i.e. bad-sounding) intervals about as often as consonant ones. But with this system, you're more or less guaranteed something that will at least sound somewhat coherent.
I seriously doubt that there is any meaningful feedback loop going on or that the hamsters are "feeling" they should go from that G# to A right now and then rest for 2 beats, or whatever. And even if they did, it's doubtful that they'd know that stepping forward would cause that note vs staying put or moving backwards.
So it would be interesting to compare to a random number generator (or some randomized approximation/model of hamster movement.)
I can't believe I just wrote 3 paragraphs about this shit. God help me.
-fren