squeak based music application

Jay Hardesty jayh at panix.com
Thu Sep 28 19:11:53 UTC 2006


Posted this to the Seaside group a few days ago -
reposting here for anyone interested checking out
a Squeak-based music app

>A Squeak-based music remixer with a Seaside web GUI,
>is (intermittently) online at: http://tone23.org/qtone.
>Will hopefully be incorporated into a commercial site
>eventually, but for now this (alpha) version is there
>for the curious, running on my home machine (a 4-processor
>Macintel).
>
>Aesthetically it's real simple (visually) so far, with
>some evident hacks owing to my limited experience with html
>and web apps. This was essentially an exercise at duplicating
>a desktop-based (Morphic) app in Seaside. (No facility for
>importing MIDI/audio files yet - only preset choices)

The output (for now) is MIDI - so your web browser will
need to have a plugin that handles MIDI. An upcoming
version will incorporate tagged audio loops, and produce
results as audio (MP3, etc).

Additional info for computer music geeks:
The software analyzes the note content of music
tracks drawn from disparate sources, and combines them
into a new piece after performing harmonic and rhythmic
manipulations to improve musical coherence, and to
produce variations.

In this version the domain is limited to a database
of groove-based music snippets that each consist of
some combination of drums, bass, lead, accompaniment,
and pad parts.

(and for ultra geeks)
The algorithms combine rule-based approaches, applies
well-formedness and preference rules for handling voices
and segments within parts, exploits connections between
binomial coefficents and rhythmic displacements in
contrapuntal voice leading, and various other approaches
from math and music theory. Genetic algorithms carry out
most of the optimizations (these have been ported to C++
via FFI for speed).

I'll try to keep the app online as much as possible,
as long as people seem to be using it - will hopefully
find a more reliable hosting solution soon.
Any problems/questions/comments/rants to jayh at panix.com.
Thanks to anyone who plays with the software (and you
should also send me your name if you do so I can hopefully
provide free access to beta users if/when the thing goes
commercial)

Jay Hardesty
jayh at panix.com
646-537-5715




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