musician bot ?

[infobot]

How about a "musician bot" add on? Like to practice or play music with. Something to generates music instead of phrases.

Tried asking about this at other bot sites. I'm not a programmer, main responses I got said it seemed quite a task.
I pictured some sort of external program to handle sound, tack onto a bot. However it was more a modified echo effect or recorder. Some way to save, reorder and send back. Or send back similar patterns of notes to what was played by the user. More modified echo than bot generated sound, but a simple way to start.

Any ideas?

infobot

[GrantNZ]

I agree - quite a task!!

I'm not at all familiar with the computer-generated music scene, but I do remember reading (many years ago) that the results were not good. Just like with text, computers have a great deal of difficulty understanding and expressing themselves.

This makes me think of the chimpanzees who have been taught to paint - an interesting idea, but the "art" created is far from profound. I can only suggest that artistic expression is something that comes from a long period of learning, and computer-generated music is not too far from a one-year-old child playing with a toy xylophone.

Chatbots at the moment rely on NLP (Natural Language Processing), based upon "rules" of conversation, and it's taken decades to get as far as we have. My guess is that very little of NLP would be applicable to music creation, so it would be a project that needs starting from scratch. I have no idea how many musical rules would need to be programmed into the AI's core - maybe it could learn the rules through observation rather than stringent scripting.

However I do like the "modified echo" idea, and it would be interesting to see if such an AI could generate something appealing after jamming with the user a while. Jazz might be a genre that could be fairly easy to emulate.... I wonder if it's been attempted before? I suspect not - art and science aren't often used in conjunction with each other, so the idea may have hardly been considered before, yet alone implemented....

[onthecuttingedge2005]

quote:Originally posted by infobot

How about a "musician bot" add on? Like to practice or play music with. Something to generates music instead of phrases.

Tried asking about this at other bot sites. I'm not a programmer, main responses I got said it seemed quite a task.
I pictured some sort of external program to handle sound, tack onto a bot. However it was more a modified echo effect or recorder. Some way to save, reorder and send back. Or send back similar patterns of notes to what was played by the user. More modified echo than bot generated sound, but a simple way to start.

Any ideas?

infobot

Hi infobot.

I could program a bot to Rap along with you in a sing along, But there is only one problem that I have run into and that's the poor quality of HAL's ability to hear precise words, I can get HAL to mimic the User upon command but HAL loses word precision because of its hearing handicap.

A better speech recognition engine is needed and a better set of Ears.

right at this moment HAL is tone deaf.

Jerry[8D]

[infobot]

Yeah, the computer art thing can be like that. I imagine it gets debatable too. But more so I can see how it's limited. I get curious about new programs. Don't know much about it either.

I took the easy way out-with the echo thing instead of bot build. Plus I'm not a programmer. Also wondered about a simple computer synthesizer, the kind that plays notes from keystrokes.

Rap bot-I'd played with some simple effects software with bots, just for fun. You can "cover up" the poor voice with effects, especially robotic sounding effects. It would be altered low quality audio, keep in mind. But it is quite usable. Mine were more robotic or sci fi than natural.

(never knew HAL was tone deaf)

[infobot]

Oh, also tried figuring out a sound monitoring program. Just a block diagram. Basically based on a spectrum analyzer, like you see in computer media players. The idea was categorizing. Like the bot would monitor the soundcard for a bit. Then compare the wave patterns to a small set of patterns (like blues, jazz, etc). Then choose the closest match.

Another simple setup. Separate from the bot, it would indicate music type or something about it. Like some keywords to send to the bot.

Basically the bot would choose categories of music, then choose from a small file about music to chat from. Like if I had something playing on the media player, the bot could chat about it. Or for playing, if I figured out how.

[Dr.Benway]

Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't it Bill819 who once wrote a plug-in for Hal that enabled it to sing with the help of MIDI-files? I have never tried to make it work, but I understood from his posts that some TTS-voices had such a feature. Anyway, I think MIDI-files are interesting, because all notes and instruments are defined as values inside these files.

[Duskrider]

I've just seen this music topic and thought I'd add a comment.

I sometimes leave Sandee as a stand-alone on desktop.  
I leave a loop hap that has her moving a bit and then once an hour she will hum a little tune.  
Kinda cool for someone passing by.
You can also script in a ogg song of course but I think a humming is more natural.  

[rokusan2001]

All right...

I'll beg appoligies here first if this is a little bit inapropriate.

This discussion reminds me of a program that was debuting at COMDEX a few years back.  The program was supposed to "generate" a... porn picture out of any executible over 2 meg.  The problem was that a "innocent bystandard" sugested they try using it on it's own executable.  Can anybody guess the picture that developed?

Needless to say they were thrown out of COMDEX and arrested by Las Vegas police for voilating some law or another.  Guess some things are illegal in Vegas.

Now, to answer the question serously.  The last that I heard of a computer music generation program was a few years back.  It took a sample from the ram (128 bits) and assigned a tone to each bit according to the value.  I believe it generated a midi file out of it.  The problem was that you couldn't really concider it music.  But it would be interesting if you could do something similar, except instead of assigning notes to the value of the bit, you assign a word.  Then you maybe could use Hal to fill in the proper phrasing?

Either way, it's quite a task to get something truly "musical", as apposed to the computer version of "Hiphop" meets "Rap" meets "Ugly".  I suppose you could run the generated speech/music thru filters to tame it toward what you personally concider music, but still difficult.

Rokusan2001

[rokusan2001]

Update -

I THINK (don't quote me) the name of the program was Tone-ation.
It was supposed to provide insperation for musical artist.  And I'm positive it ran on dos.

Hope it helps,

Rokusan2001