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."
Powered you say? (Score:5, Funny)
like the article says (hmm... looks like mains to me). Either that, or he's
utilising the bio-electric energy of the hamsters... as a means of control,
to turn a hamster into this! [holds up battery] </matrix quote>
Hamster Death (Score:5, Funny)
Additionaly, If a snake was introduced would the music change to a faster and more "scary" melody due to the hamster's fear? Or if you put a male in and female together, would the result be Barry Manilow's "Let's get it on"
There is a whole array of scientific discoveries to be found in the realm of hamster-psychology and music.
Re:Hamster Death (Score:5, Funny)
*shudder*
"Let's Get It On" was sung by Marvin Gaye. Either you were thinking of Barry White, or you've got some issues.
Re:Hamster Death (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hamster Death (Score:2)
Re:Hamster Death (Score:2, Funny)
Marvin, would it kill you to talk to your father every once in a while?
Re:Hamster Death (Score:5, Funny)
If a snake was introduced would the music change to a faster and more "scary" melody due to the hamster's fear?
Badger badger badger badger badger badger... oh a snake! It's a snake! ooh! Badger badger badger badger badger badger.
In Scotland they've got them doing (Score:4, Funny)
Incredible! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Incredible! (Score:5, Funny)
mm (Score:2, Funny)
Pretty Good... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Pretty Good... (Score:2)
Re:Pretty Good... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pretty Good... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pretty Good... (Score:2)
Re:Pretty Good... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pretty Good... (Score:2)
Re:Pretty Good... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Pretty Good... (Score:2)
hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
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???
Re:hmmm (Score:2)
Re:hmmm (Score:2)
I'd imagine that when they released all the CDs and all, they had to get permission from Disney. Either that, or Disney Radio (the one down with all the Christian stations, right?) is just playing the original.
Reminds me of the Guns'n'Roses fan in my car who was appalled at the terrible cover of "Sympathy for the Devil" done by that new band "Rolling Stones".
--
Evan
Re:hmmm (Score:2)
The Hamsters say... (Score:2)
Re:The Hamsters say... (Score:5, Funny)
"Joel had a habit of coming into the studio with his cheeks stuffed totally full of seed and corn. You think you can make music like that? He was out of control. Worse, he was bringing the rest of us down. That's when we decided to have an intervention."
Dupe!! (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about hampster controlled midi sequencers, but our editors apear to be hampsters
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.
Re:A modest proposal for fixing the Slashdot front (Score:4, Funny)
Which makes one wonder what they are doing instead of their real jobs. Tediously maintaining databases and web sites, as those of us posting slashdot are supposed to be doing at the time?
No, that can't be it.
Re:A modest proposal for fixing the Slashdot front (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A modest proposal for fixing the Slashdot front (Score:4, Insightful)
That FAQ answer was 5 years ago, things have changed. Back then I think Rob probably still cared, he probably was still aiming to cash in on the dot.com boom, probably hadn't cashed in any stock yet, and it was before moderation. All the complaints he had there about what the mob would pick can be said about moderation on posts too but we still do that now. I wager he cares a lot less about Slashdot today than he did then or he would have taken some action to put an end to all the dupe front page stories. I'm wondering if:
A. he hasn't even noticed the massive number of dupes and bogus stories lately
B. he doesn't care
"That's a lot of drudgery, and the only people willing to do it would be those with an agenda or without a life."
Uh no, it would be the same people who moderate posts, everybody would do a little. Either moderation works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work it shouldn't be used on ordinary posts. If it does work it will work on submissions too with a little tweaking. You could start out just taking one or two moderated front page stories a day to work out the details and see if it works.
I can also see a big benefit of having all raw submissions being publicly viewable. If you are about to submit a story you can look and see if its already submitted and not waste everyone's time posting it again if a good submission is already in the queue. It would be kind of interesting to see all the things people are submitting that are getting rejected.
Outsourcing opportunity... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Outsourcing opportunity... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Outsourcing opportunity... (Score:3, Funny)
Well, I am a musician, so that sounds like a plan to me.
- KillerHamster
this is old (Score:2)
here is the OLD article [slashdot.org].
Amateur........the quality of Slashdot is bad enough with Tim, now we have Zonk. Great.....
Re:this is old (Score:2)
Seems like he's actually -with- the program..
MIDI (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MIDI (Score:2)
Re:MIDI (Score:3, Funny)
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:Buggy MIDI drivers (Score:2)
Re:MIDI (Score:2)
I can trivially produce an MP3 of a MIDI project that your hardware would have been incapable of reproducing with the MIDI file. Why distribute via MP3? Because MP3 is an audio file, a MIDI file is a protocol file, and with the MP3 file, you can actually hear the music rather than a chintzy recreation based upon the
Re:MIDI (Score:2, Insightful)
Just FYI
A true test is to compare it to random music. (Score:4, Insightful)
The true test would be to see if an observer detects any difference between random controls and a hamster.
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 :-)
Re:A true test is to compare it to random music. (Score:3, Funny)
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
Don't download it! (Score:2, Funny)
The hamsters are going to sue for IP rights.
A Dupe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashcode needs a system to detect dupes. Here is what I propose:
All submissions will include a link to the "article text." This is the primary link in the submission: what the
These links will be kept in a database. Any time an article is submitted to slashdot its primary link will be searched for in the database. If found, the article will be flagged as such (NOT automatically rejected, someone might notice something new about an old document (probably legal or similar) or some such.)
Now to go off and learn to program, so I can add that into the mess that is slashcode... ugh.
Re:A Dupe... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A Dupe... (Score:2)
Re:A Dupe... (Score:2)
Re:A Dupe... (Score:2)
However, the point remains the same -- we would see far fewer dupes if our dear editors showed a little more enterprise. There are plenty of ways in which they can reduce dupes. (Actually reading Slashdot once in
It will never happen. (Score:2)
I'm beginning to think that the Slashdot editors were all laid off and that their jobs are now being performed by a badly-written jumble of Perl scripts.
Grammy (Score:5, Funny)
Link to mp3 on frontpage. (Score:2)
Re:Link to mp3 on frontpage. (Score:2)
Re:Link to mp3 on frontpage. (Score:2)
This has two implications: First, a customer doesn't get bent over if they get a traffic spike or DoS that is short-lived...you c
Yes, but can they... (Score:5, Funny)
dance [webhamster.com]?
(I'm pretty sure that's the original song before the first site or two "sold out").
Man, I can't believe I just talked about hamsters selling out.
10000 Monkeys (Score:2)
Walking down the street
We get the funniest looks from
Everyone we meet."
"Hey, Hey we're the Hamsters,
and people say we hamster around.
But we're too busy singing,
to put anybody down...."
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.
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 l
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
Hampsters or Badgers (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hampsters or Badgers (Score:2)
I think it'd be best determined by Joel Veitch of Rathergood.com [rathergood.com]
I think it'd actually turn out to be the Ineffable Crab of Wisdom who'd come out on top in a Battle of the Animals.
Fartman (Score:2, Funny)
Critique (Score:2, Interesting)
Hauntingly familiar... (Score:5, Funny)
Before he could place the tune, his reverie was interrupted.
"Mr. Gere, your limousine has arrived."
"Thank you, Miles," he said distractedly, but not before the tiniest hint of a smile crossed his face.
Better to use realHamspster cybernetic version (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, but anything with "hamster" in it makes me think of this:
RealHampster - Elastic flesh, luxurious fur, a cybernetic infrastructure [realhamster.com]
I'm ruined for life.
Re:Better to use realHamspster cybernetic version (Score:2)
Hampster Gamelan & Boethius (Score:2)
On a deja vous note, it's interesting how we're looking for musical patterns in nature. It's not unlike Boethius's (ca. 480-524) theory of musica mundana, or "music of the cosmos," where he theorized that the macrocosmos was held together by this mysterious musical pow
But... (Score:2)
Wow... (Score:3, Informative)
There's gotta be some might big bandwidth here. Of course, it IS cornell.
Re:Wow... (Score:2)
Re:Wow... (Score:2)
Re:Wow... (Score:2)
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
mouse organ (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
So this is the wanker.. (Score:2, Funny)
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 Mus [nosuch.com]
Powered and operated... (Score:2, Funny)
Chipmunks have them beat (Score:2)
Chipmunks [dreamvalley-mlp.com] don't need no steenkin' Markov Polov to make music [copycommaright.com].
The Greatest Evil on Earth (Score:2)
My Car (Score:2, Funny)
WEIRD! Real player put an advertisement in!!! (Score:2)
I played about a minute of the mp3 using Realplay, got bored with it (cute, but not my kind of music) and closed the Real Player window.
About three seconds later, this nasal wench started giving me a spiel about Vonage! Which is some kind of VOIP telephone thing, I guess, but nothing I have any use for. RealPlayer wasn't visibly running, nothing was displayed on my desktop, but in the background this woman blathered on for about 30 seconds.
I tried to get it to repeat itself, but I cou
Re:WEIRD! Real player put an advertisement in!!! (Score:2)
No, Helix and RealPlayer dont play material like that..
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).
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
Excellent! (Score:3, Funny)
k.
Musical mice (Score:4, Funny)
Beats bashing mice with a mallet. Anyone for 'The Bells of St. Marys' ?
I love this!! (Score:2)
Music (Score:2)
Probably alread posted but... (Score:2)
Hamsters to Take Over Music Industry (Score:2)
It bears an odd resemblance... (Score:2)
What if the hamsters could hear it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Message from the hamsters (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You are a very sick person. (Score:3, Funny)