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Music Amiga

'Artificial Creativity' Music Software For Commodore Amiga Unearthed (breakintochat.com) 39

Posted by BeauHD from the ahead-of-its-time dept.
Kirkman14 writes: Josh Renaud of breakintochat.com has recovered two early examples of "artificial creativity" software for the Commodore Amiga that generate new music by recombining patterns extracted from existing music. Developed by cartoonist Ya'akov Kirschen and his Israeli software firm LKP Ltd. in 1986-87, "Computer Composer" demo and "Magic Harp" baroque were early attempts at AI-like autonomous music generation.

Kirschen's technology was used to help score a BBC TV documentary in 1988, and was covered by the New York Times and other major newspapers. None of the Amiga software was ever sold, though the technology was ported to PC and published under the name "The Music Creator" in 1989.
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'Artificial Creativity' Music Software For Commodore Amiga Unearthed More

'Artificial Creativity' Music Software For Commodore Amiga Unearthed

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  • Even retrocomputing stories get the AI badge (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday January 11, 2024 @05:09AM (#64149111)

    Can we read a story - any story - that doesn't mention AI? It's really tiring...

    • Mentioning AI has is a time-honored tradition in computing! Even back in 1988, Kirschen was giving his twist on the "AI" label. From a profile in the Los Angeles Times [latimes.com]:

      "It's not artificial intelligence," said Kirschen of his system. "It's artificial creativity."

      [...]

      Kirschen's system goes beyond that, however, creating melody, harmony and rhythm from what the Brooklyn native described as the musical "genes" he has programmed into it.

      "The premise is that music is alive, and anything alive has a genetic stru

    • SCP (Score:2)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 )

      There's a great SCP foundation story about a kid who wrote a malevolent AI on his Amstrad in the 1980's but, because of it's limited memory, it couldn't fully formulate a plan on destroying humanity.

    • Wait until /. is run by AI! :P

  • Not suprising (Score:5, Informative)

    by king*jojo ( 9276931 ) on Thursday January 11, 2024 @05:11AM (#64149115)
    Most people went nuts over the Amiga for graphics/video toaster, but it was the machine for music/sound (sorry Atari)

    I'm not sure we still haven't come up with a better/easier/more efficient manner of sequencing samples than MOD trackers.
    • 100%

    • Re:Not suprising (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Gibgezr ( 2025238 ) on Thursday January 11, 2024 @01:21PM (#64150217)

      One of my friend's fathers had a nice professional multi-track studio (reel-to-reel tape and digital). Dude was a professional musician for his entire life. He ran the whole thing via MIDI with a couple of Amigas. The Atari ST had a lot of the same software, and 50 cents worth of built-in midi ports as well, but he preferred the Amiga for a multitude of reasons, and the Amigas were definitely far superior in terms of chipset and expansion capabilities, and the OS was just fantastic (for the day: a hacker's delight, but in the modern world it would be a security nightmare). There was a lot of cool software, very creative stuff, not just some form of boring DAWs. Dr. T's, Bars'n Pipes, lots of neat tools for composition. He never even cared about the tracker stuff, but I really liked Modtracker/Octomed etc., and for real-time software like games tracker songs were fantastic compromises.

      • To be fair the Atari had a dollar's worth of opto-isolators too :)

        • Yeah, I always thought Commodore dropped the ball a tiny bit by not doing the same.Those built-in midi ports did make the ST look attractive for music production/performance to anyone out computer shopping, I think that was one of the smartest things Atari did with the ST.

          • Commodore should have just offered a cheap factory official adapter, it would have solved that problem. Weird they did a whole complex RF adapter, but not that.

            • There were several inexpensive Midi modules and serial cable adapters available. All they needed was opto-isolators and hardware, and both Commodore and third parties provided free Midi drivers for the serial port.

              • I never saw one under a hundred bucks, which is a lot for practically nothing.

                I got the parts to build one just about the same time I decided to get rid of my amiga. Oh well, surely they will come in handy for something else eventually

      • I sold my last Amiga to a musician, quite a few years after the Amiga heyday.

        • Ya, musicians were among the last die-hards keeping an Amiga in operation long after Commodore imploded.

          • This always surprised me. The PC and most other microcomputers very much felt like they were built by typical microcomputer folk - ie, CP/M or monitor style, single tasking with clumsy experiments with TSR gadgets. Amiga felt like professionals who'd worked previously on more advanced systems worked on it - a much more sophisticated OS with multitasking, only one hardcoded address in the OS (to be future proof), configurable interrupt controllers, advanced hardware coprocessors for graphics and sound, etc.

            • For sure, the Amiga was so wonderful to develop for, a multi-tasking OS with source code documentation available (The ROM Kernel manuals), cool audio and video chips, and built for reasonable expansion. It was a hacker's wet dream.It was so far ahead of its time, it's mind-boggling that they could drop the ball on the line. Every computer scientist who played with one instantly fell in love with the things, and the art/music tools were top-notch. We mentioned some music composition programs in other posts,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Matheus ( 586080 )

      I miss my Amiga.. had a 1000 and a 2000HD just ditched off the 2000 3 years ago.

      I didn't spend nearly enough time getting deep into music production on those but I did have a pretty great (Minus some glaring bugs) MIDI-based Sequencer called Music-X that had some ridiculous capabilities for the time and my favorite software was called Music Studio which allowed you to do a bunch of really cool waveform synthesis.. only problem was they used some absolutely stupid DRM that bricked the software if you tried t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by noodler ( 724788 )

      but it was the machine for music/sound (sorry Atari)

      Nah, it's not that simple.
      It had a few low quality sample channels. Atari had MIDI and the software to use that.
      Now, i do recognize that the sampling capabilities of the Amiga brought forth an big wave of creativity. But ultimately, with much more interesting MIDI devices entering the market (for instance samplers with cd quality audio and much higher polyphony) from the late 80s onward, the impact of the atari can't be underestimated.

  • Reminds me of Jam Session (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Reminds me of Jam Session: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    While it doesn't generate music. It plays various music and allows the human player to play mostly in key along with the music. The player can also play patterns (riffs etc which may adjust their key accordingly) and also effects.

    Yep just bang on the keyboard and you usually won't play a wrong note!
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Algomusic (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <.moc.eeznerif.todhsals. .ta. .treb.> on Thursday January 11, 2024 @05:40AM (#64149169) Homepage

    The Amiga also had a tool called Algomusic, which generated random music:
    https://aminet.net/package/mus... [aminet.net]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Layzej ( 1976930 )
      Aminet! Still kicking, and still getting several uploads a day. Sure brings back memories :)

    • I googled a lot about music generation recent years.
      Seems that is not a popular topic anymore.

      I had music generators on my first Macs, and my friends had the same on Amiga and Atari machines.

      Basically I'm looking for a pentatonic randomized music generator.

      I guess I have to write one myself ... I'm good at programming, but not good at music :(

  • Hardly uncommon (Score:5, Informative)

    by clickclickdrone ( 964164 ) on Thursday January 11, 2024 @06:42AM (#64149253)
    There were a few similar generative programs for the Atari ST & Mac at that time such as M by Dr T Software.

  • Must've been a pretty simple algorithm if it could run on a 7 MHz processor with 1 MB RAM.

    • Or better coded software that what is coded today.

      • Code (Score:2)

        by JBMcB ( 73720 )

        I was going to say, hand-coded 68000 runs amazingly well, especially as the 68000 was known to have a very coder-friendly ISA.

    • RAM is not an issue.
      And the Amigas where running on derivates of 68k processors.

      That is/was a very powerful processor family. No idea about frequency, I had thought they all where 16MHz that time already.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossdee ( 243626 )

        The Amiga 1000 and 500 had 7.1 MHz 68000
        You could add an accelerator card to a 2000 with 14.2 Mhz 68020, and later 25MHz 68030
        I had a 33MHz GVP '030 card in my 2000
        The Amiga 3000 had a 25 MHz 030

        The A1200 had a 14.2 MHz 020, but you could get 3rd party accelerator card for that too.

        Sadly I had to leave my Amigas when I migrated to the states in 2002

        • That is actually indeed sad.
          I and my friend had simple Mac SE ( I think 8 MHz?)
          He upgraded to an SE30, and I bought a 68030 expansion card for my Mac. Was awesome.
          Then we found a Unix derivate for Macs. I think the name started with a T.
          From the point of view of the instruction set, those processors (68k) I really liked. The only other one on par is ARM.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Matheus ( 586080 )

        Also missing the best part of the Amiga: They didn't do everything on the CPU!!!

        Gonna quote from wiki because lazy:
        "The Amiga has a custom chipset consisting of several coprocessors which handle audio, video, and direct memory access independently of the Central Processing Unit (CPU). This architecture gave the Amiga a performance edge over its competitors, particularly for graphics-intensive applications and games."

        The Amiga was truly a better platform back then... too bad Commodore screwed it up :(

  • Archeologists don't dig through the dirt anymore, they just find old floppies and see what's on them.

  • People have been trying to write music composing software since computers had enough RAM to hold the sheet music for an entire song. Most of the early efforts involved creative filters applied to the output of a random number generator. None of it was what anybody would think of as AI. It was thought that music is by its nature inherently algorithmic, so writing and recognizing it might be a natural thing for computers to do.

  • There are some downloadable disk images on the page of the last link (here [breakintochat.com])

    Did anyone try to install and run it yet?

    • Hi, this is Josh Renaud, the Break Into Chat guy ... I found it tricky to get TMC to run in emulation on my Mac in 2022.

      The three-disk installer did not work properly in DOSBox, for some reason. But it *did* work for me in QEMU, so I installed to a hard disk image.

      Then, after successfully completing installation, I tried to run TMC in QEMU. The program launches just fine, but when I hit "play", I hear no audio of the music. I tried tweaking the configuration a bunch of ways, but nothing made a differenc

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