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."
A "Land" of great projects... (Score:5, Interesting)
, he seems to always encourage interesting and wacky ideas, like a radio controlled helicopter, a sound seeking robot, a Wonderswan cartridge, etc.
Speaking of which, I tried to create a musical "generator" that used a random number generator as the core and used a Markov chain obtained from computer analysis of a composer's music style. Unfortunately, it seemed that above all, the very high level aspects of the music seemed totally chaotic, and the amount that did not seem chaotic were dependent on how much data I input or assumed. Compare it to generic "normal" music, and you'll find that normal music tend to have very non-chaotic higher level structures, and might be more chaotic once you get to lower levels such as individual notes and runs. Looks like they have done a similar thing, but they must have had trained the Markov chain with a lot more data than I had. However, you can still hear the higher order chaos, since the music sorta just plays, but doesn't really go anywhere.
Critique (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A true test is to compare it to random music. (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, to me the most amazing thing was to see somebody who knows which end of a soldering iron to hold, can program in C, and understands Markov chains to the point of "daisy chaining" hamsters to it :-)
A modest proposal for fixing the Slashdot front pa (Score:5, Interesting)
You give people with reasonable karma an extra set of mod points that only can be used to mode story submissions.
You would need to give people with mod points the ability to mark stories as duplicates of recent posts and they would land in the trash bin immediately, there is something of an honor system there though meta moderation could catch people who can stories as dupes that aren't.
The moderators would also need a way to move new submissions in to groups so that all the submissions on the same news are grouped together.
Then the moderators start scoring submissions just like moderation does now. The top scoring submission within the group would be the one that gets considered for the front page.
You would also need to choose the most highly moderated stories between all the groups on different news.
You can establish how many stories you want to get to the front page each day say 12, so every 2 hours on average the current top moderated submission would be automaticly posted. Maybe you post a few more during peak reader hours in the U.S. and Europe.
You might want to allow a higher top score than +5 for this system so really stellar stories get a really high score.
Its sad to have to propose such a solution but its becoming pretty obvious that Rob and Co. aren't reading the site they moderate less than most of the rest of us. Presumably Slashdot has turned in to a job for them and they apparently don't like their job. Most of us read Slashdot when we should be doing our real job, while apparently they don't read it and it is their job.
If you keep posting dupe after dupe it proves you aren't reading all the front page articles or you would remember something as "unique" as a hamster powered songwriter.
Its also been suggested that they are showing some pretty serious bias, Michael for example always going with left leaning stories, and they all seem to have assigned submission god status to Rolan Piqa-whatever.
I'm willing to guess, with some work, moderated control of the front page would be fairer and less likely to produce dupes and bias than the current system. I also wager they might do a better job of picking the best submission on a story and cull out the error filled, flawed and factually incorrect posts which also are appearing on the front page too often lately.
After all this is an open source fanboy site so why is control of Slashdot's front page proprietary and closed.
At least this time, our server is prepared. (Score:2, Interesting)
What you're looking at in the picture is my old office. Levy worked with me during the course of a summer a couple of years ago, and I remember when he took that picture. Mostly, I remember that the hamsters were stinking up the lab!
Any way, Levy, if you read this, congrats on getting
-Nick
Sounds like an album I heard... (Score:2, Interesting)
The hamsters' music sounds something like the Team Metlay [atomiccity.com] album Ballistic [cdbaby.com]. Especially a song like Trajectory [cdbaby.com]
This is a great album by the way..."Aqua Regia" is one of the best uses of 30 minutes worth of CD media that I've ever heard. Team Metlay is the Internet's first supergroup...a bunch of e-musicians get together every year for a few weeks, and write, record, and produce an album, and have been since 1994 or so. Pretty eclectic stuff, for people that like the Mind/Body industrial compilations [sonic-boom.com] or MuseNet [nosuch.com] -- perfect for the Slashdot crowd, I figure.
What if the hamsters could hear it? (Score:3, Interesting)