Love this. A project I've had in mind for a while but realistically will never get around to building is an ambient/coding music generator that's hooked up to a metric, e.g. your project's latency, autoscale size, error rate, potentially controlling different instruments.
It would be fun to be able to subconsciously monitor your system without staring at graphs.
A long time ago, a friend mentioned this exact same idea! The analogy he used was how steam engine operators became so familiar with their machines that they could tell what was going on just by listening. I'm not sure if we can really do the same with services, but it's a fun thought experiment.
You can sort of do this with a modern computer. The CPU and GPU fans spin up on increased load, and you can listen to the hard drive (the sounds correspond to some degree to the HDD indicator light). Over time you can get an idea of system activity just by listening to the machine itself.
At one place I worked at back in the 1970s there was a speaker on the mainframe (it may have just been a transistor radio picking up interference) and you could get some idea of what the machine was doing from the sound.
Hansen and Rubin did something like this in 2001 [1]. I have some audio samples of their program's product from monitoring the Lucent site at 6 AM, noon, and 2:30 PM - decidedly different sounds at each time.
Edit: The page on Hansen's website about this project (Listening Post) is available in archive.org, but without any audio samples alas [2]
That's a cool idea. Something that was suggested to me with Flowful was to use some sort of body triggers, perhaps from facial recgonition through your device's camera, to determine when the user was becoming less focused. The music could then adapt to help them get back on track.
XD yes! I want to jack my earbuds into the stock market: time and sales frequency denoting tempo and trade volume denoting dynamics; with a real time candle analyzer modulating between keys. Each company would be a different song!
When I was younger, I was into autohotkey. My PC would go off because of a powercut and the ups failed in 4-8 minutes while beeping.
Found "tonedet" or something that listens to a specific tone and does something via ahk which in my case was proper shutdown.
That was a success.
Then I thought of a project that would give me status via soundbeep,500,400.
I never got around to doing that but it wouldn't have been half bad.
Three small beeps in a succession, repeat, internet is down or some combination of deep or low beeps to say something else.
My initial EE Senior project proposal (back in the early 90's) was a biofeedback controlled music generator. The idea was to use a Markov chain (not that I knew that term, but I'd heard of the concept) to produce tone sequences, then use biofeedback to alter the probabilities to encourage relaxation. With my luck, it probably would have devolved into a metronome, but I was young and naive.
I ended up failing out of college (I was young and stupid, too) and when I returned 5 years later I ended up changing my senior project to a leg controller for a hexapod robot.
I make algorithmic (infinite) music in a DAW (Reaper) and have been thinking about porting some of it to the browser, but didn't actually do anything about it :-(
Can you describe the architecture a little? Are you using the Web Audio API for the instruments (and timing)? Are tracks static/looping, or dynamic (created on the fly based on random parameters)?
Yeah sure - you're right, it's using a lib built on top of the Web Audio API called Tone Js. This handles scheduling and some instruments, but the sounds themselves are mostly samples which I record myself from VSTs, then do things in the browser such as filter modulation so that they sound different over time. When a track loads for you, that's the samples being loaded in from cloud storage.
As for static vs dynamic, it's a mix of both. Some tracks are more static than others, and I have learned it actually seems better to try and use randomness sparingly. Almost all tracks will use probabilities of loops firing, and some watch for the status of other loops to create sections (e.g, always fire A if not firing B). Note / Chord selection also often contains randomness, such as a probability to pick each note from a list, then a probability that note itself to fire.
I quite like the way it sounds. Randomness is difficult, indeed. If you ever want to look at something less random: 1/f noise generates more interesting sequences than white or pink noise.
I'm looking for a good tool and stack for this too, along with algorithmic visuals.
I have a synesthesia-themed project (https://testfixture.presteign.com) where I currently make all the audio with generative synthesis in a DAW and the visuals by hand in a design package, but I'd love to branch out into fully-procedural at some point.
Absolutely love this concept. One issue I'm having after listening for a while to a variety of the channels is that the music is all pretty "sad."
I don't know enough about music theory to give you more detail than that, but is there a way you can add more upbeat songs, to get my mood up, energy up, motivation kicking in? Listening to these, I kind of want to take a nap.
Introducing major key based songs would do a lot to improve the mood of the music.
In general, major keys are used for a lot of pop music...for example, both the Beatles and Nirvana wrote almost all their hits using major keys (Let It Be and Smells Like Teen Spirit), while ballads and more sad and "moody" music (ie Stairway to Heaven/Zeppelin and Unforgiven/Metallica) will be written in minors.
Also, tempo is important to add to the"upbeatness" of a piece...it would an interesting addition to this wonderful program to add switches for major/minor key and tempo.
I love ambient tunes and listen to them for 1-10 hours a day while doing stuff. Any time I need to focus (even when writing an email) I'll throw on my favorite ambient music.
How is this any different? Why would I get a "premium" account for some random website when there's an entire catalog of ambient music on Spotify/Apple/etc that I could listen to?
The biggest differentiator may be the infinite length of tracks. Once you tune into something that fits it can be left going as long as necessary. With other services there is a need to compose play lists or restart the player when a selection ends.
Similar to flowful, endel creates generative soundscapes based on mood/need: focus, read, work out, drive, you get the picture.
I appreciated that they made a concerted effort to anchor what they did in music and scientific theory, to understand what makes for good focus, what focus is, etc.
Also cool: It uses time of day, local weather, and your activity level as inputs to its generative music, so in theory, it's very contextual.
Interestingly: was a happily paying subscriber for over a year, but lapsed because I moved out of the city, began working in a private office, and found that I no longer needed to close out the outer world to focus well :shrug: who knew?
Sure thing. Further down in another comment I went into how the music is made, so I'll stick to the tech stack here.
The frontend is built with React, Chakra UI and Tailwind CSS. It also does all of the audio generation using a scheduling library called Tone.js.
Auth / Database are handled by Firebase, and payments are by Stripe. It's fully serverless; I use cloud functions for anything server side.
The samples themselves are stored in Google Cloud Storage, although I may need to look into a different method or making it more efficient, as today's traffic has absolutely smashed through the free downloads tier.
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It would be fun to be able to subconsciously monitor your system without staring at graphs.
Edit: The page on Hansen's website about this project (Listening Post) is available in archive.org, but without any audio samples alas [2]
[1] http://legacy.spa.aalto.fi/icad2001/proceedings/papers/hanse...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20020414095256fw_/http://www.ear...
So many cool possibilities.
Then I thought of a project that would give me status via soundbeep,500,400.
I never got around to doing that but it wouldn't have been half bad.
Three small beeps in a succession, repeat, internet is down or some combination of deep or low beeps to say something else.
I ended up failing out of college (I was young and stupid, too) and when I returned 5 years later I ended up changing my senior project to a leg controller for a hexapod robot.
Deleted Comment
I make algorithmic (infinite) music in a DAW (Reaper) and have been thinking about porting some of it to the browser, but didn't actually do anything about it :-(
Can you describe the architecture a little? Are you using the Web Audio API for the instruments (and timing)? Are tracks static/looping, or dynamic (created on the fly based on random parameters)?
As for static vs dynamic, it's a mix of both. Some tracks are more static than others, and I have learned it actually seems better to try and use randomness sparingly. Almost all tracks will use probabilities of loops firing, and some watch for the status of other loops to create sections (e.g, always fire A if not firing B). Note / Chord selection also often contains randomness, such as a probability to pick each note from a list, then a probability that note itself to fire.
Hope that makes sense!
(Are "tracks" simple MIDI files or some combination of JSON/JS?)
Anyway, nice work! ;-)
I have a synesthesia-themed project (https://testfixture.presteign.com) where I currently make all the audio with generative synthesis in a DAW and the visuals by hand in a design package, but I'd love to branch out into fully-procedural at some point.
I don't know enough about music theory to give you more detail than that, but is there a way you can add more upbeat songs, to get my mood up, energy up, motivation kicking in? Listening to these, I kind of want to take a nap.
In general, major keys are used for a lot of pop music...for example, both the Beatles and Nirvana wrote almost all their hits using major keys (Let It Be and Smells Like Teen Spirit), while ballads and more sad and "moody" music (ie Stairway to Heaven/Zeppelin and Unforgiven/Metallica) will be written in minors.
Also, tempo is important to add to the"upbeatness" of a piece...it would an interesting addition to this wonderful program to add switches for major/minor key and tempo.
I love ambient tunes and listen to them for 1-10 hours a day while doing stuff. Any time I need to focus (even when writing an email) I'll throw on my favorite ambient music.
How is this any different? Why would I get a "premium" account for some random website when there's an entire catalog of ambient music on Spotify/Apple/etc that I could listen to?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C-yRNPy59qlDkuU7YRzo...
Similar to flowful, endel creates generative soundscapes based on mood/need: focus, read, work out, drive, you get the picture.
I appreciated that they made a concerted effort to anchor what they did in music and scientific theory, to understand what makes for good focus, what focus is, etc.
Also cool: It uses time of day, local weather, and your activity level as inputs to its generative music, so in theory, it's very contextual.
Interestingly: was a happily paying subscriber for over a year, but lapsed because I moved out of the city, began working in a private office, and found that I no longer needed to close out the outer world to focus well :shrug: who knew?
Perfect for a daily meditation.
The frontend is built with React, Chakra UI and Tailwind CSS. It also does all of the audio generation using a scheduling library called Tone.js.
Auth / Database are handled by Firebase, and payments are by Stripe. It's fully serverless; I use cloud functions for anything server side.
The samples themselves are stored in Google Cloud Storage, although I may need to look into a different method or making it more efficient, as today's traffic has absolutely smashed through the free downloads tier.