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Underground > Creation >

Electronic music, made out of electronic texts

  
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
13:37 / 30.04.06
The way I made this song is quite simple, but also a little in-depth, if no-one cares to hear it, so I'll explain how if anyone wants.

But for now, I'd like to present this song to you. The synth track is made from the script to the badger dance flash, and the drum track is made from the text of those stupid owls I don't have a link to right now. It's basically "O RLY? YA RLY! o rly? ya rly!" repeated 32 or 64 times, with the lowercase duplicate there to give it a little bit of variety.

I'd be interested to hear anything anyone has to say about this track, I think it's pretty interesting despite being fairly limited - I'm trying to find a nice way to work the chorus of Stutter Rap by Morris Minor and the Majors in, maybe as a trombone, but my character-to-note mapping makes it sound awful, at the moment. Anyone with any suggestions for texts to except and loop is also welcome to share.

And, if you want, you can have my code, but it's in no fit state for anyone who is not me to read at the moment, so you might have to wait a while for that.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
18:18 / 30.04.06
Wow, that's beautiful- please tell us how you did it!
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
03:27 / 01.05.06
thanks! That's really made my day, heh.

The basic idea is matching notes+durations to characters in text files, by frequency. I've written scripts to go through text files and order the characters which appear in them by frequency (I'm using Philip K. Dick's Confessions of a Crap-Artist as my basic 'text' frequency-thing at the moment, but if a text is long enough, you tend to get the same order: space character, e, t, o, h... etc. Some uppercase letters are more common than some lowercase letters, and newline, hyphen and tab are pretty common). I also wrote a script to go through a midi file, and rip out all of its notes, along with a duration (if I didn't pull out a duration, everything I got would end up being very ... regular. And boring). Once I've got my two frequency tables, I get some third (or, in the case of the song above, third and fourth) text file, and go through it one character at a time. Each character is then replaced by the note and duration which is in the same position on the frequency table, and output into a midi file.

Which is actually much simpler than I thought it would be, when I first conceived of making text into sound. I started with just one text, and one instrument, and I have a 326 minute long opus, which is directly equivalent to PKD's 'confessions of...' to the point where you could 'read' it, if you could remember the note/duration-> character mapping.

Which is kind of cool in its own right, but 326 minutes is slower than reading the thing, so...

Yes, so, anyway. If you've got a perl interpreter on your machine, I can send you my current version, which takes two text files, and makes one the synth (it's the synth rythm drum from the midi patch list, I think), and the other into the drumtrack. It's fun to play with, but it's not hugely user friendly, as I haven't had time to pretty it up much.
Even if you don't understand perl, you could change the tempo and the instrument which each text file gets changed into pretty easily...

One day, I'm going to make it cgi-compatible, and put it on my website, so people can make music out of any file I can get to on the internets, but right now this is in the 'too hard' basket.

If you put any (non-looped) text through as a drum machine, and with a high tempo, you get this sort of spastic thrashing which could almost work for a noise band. I'm tempted to make a 'band' with Conrad on synth, Dick on drums, and google search results on synth bass, but it'd be far too horrible to bear.

(note that I'm using PKD only because I had easy access to long text files written by him, not because of some underhanded plan to disseminate enlightenment into people's brains, matrix-warrior stylee, or anything)
 
 
lekvar
23:34 / 03.05.06
What an incredibly cool idea. The end result is surprisingly... coherent and rather pleasant (though a little massaging of the final MIDI file could result in so much more). I wish I knew anything about scripting languages, I'd love to take this for a spin. Post some more results when you have them, please.
 
 
Mike Modular
00:27 / 04.05.06
RFR I salute you! I won't pretend to completely understand exactly how you did it, but I've always loved the idea of converting text/image into sound and so, yes, is good. I've just had a little dabble by putting the MIDI file into Logic and seeing what happened... Sounds pretty good with Sculpture and Ultrabeat. Also, it came out at a much slower tempo, plus not all the drum sounds were mapped, making for an interesting minimalist composition... I shall play further (if you don't mind...)
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
06:34 / 04.05.06
no, go for it. If you find anything interesting, send them to me (danoot @ the domain the midi is hosted on). I have no midi-editing facilities of any kind, so once I've made the thing, I can't change it, except by changing my source texts or the code, which is a bit of work.

It's coherent because the texts I used were pretty minimal. If you've seen the badger dance, you'll know that most of it is just "badger" over and over again. This produces the kind of throbbing bass sound, and the boo-boop sound is "mushroom, mushroom!". The other part is the bit about the snake, heh.

I recently tried to make some music out of the human genetic code, but it sounded pretty much rubbish.
Short strings of text seem to make pretty good drum beats, so far. I'm also going to get a better midi to take my frequency table from, because at the moment, a whole lot of the notes are really, really short, to the point of being inaudible, so many common letters turn into basically nothing, or static. Which sucks.

I'm finally free of assignments for a little while, so I'll go play with it now and see what I come up with.
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
11:28 / 04.05.06
Ok, I've made a few more.
This is the same as the tune above, but in different instruments, and sounding better, in my opinion.

These next are slowed right down and so have ended up a bit more ambient than the last one.

Tunaking is made with a Shakuhachi patch, and an ambient FX (99 - Atmosphere) patch. It's about 6:20 long, and it's pretty calm and relaxed with some tootling bits and some ... well, I guess it's some kind of Shakuhachi, or something. I don't know what it is, but it sounds kind of like the soundtrack to a martial arts movie, the part before the big attack when everyone is meditating on the waving bamboo.

Tunebadger is a bit more crunchy and sounds a little like the theme to a failed saturday morning SciFi show. It's also six and a half minutes long, because one of the files is the same as one of the files from Tunaking above (tracks are named after the files they're made from and/or the instruments they use). Kind of cool, but not hugely exciting.

King Bagpipe is a strange one. I'm not exactly sure what's going on here, but it has a bagpipe in it. It sounds kind of like the morning before an execution, and breaks into a lament at about two and a half minutes in.

Actually, I just realised that these three tracks result from the different pairings of three text files. It's kind of interesting how things change across them. The different instruments help, obviously.

let me know what you think.

I've made the process much more user-friendly, now, so if anyone wants my script to play with it themselves, send me a pm. all you'll need is a perl interpreter, you don't need to know how to program perl in any way. The only thing you could change is the tempo, and I'll tell you how to do that.
 
  
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