News You Can Bruise for 2004 June 10 (entry 0)

(4) Thu Jun 10 2004 21:52 PST Alto on Altoids: Jake wrote a dada sampling program that makes old music new again. It's great if you like noise, and who doesn't? Well, I didn't, at first, but it grew on me. Good job, Jake. I would love to hear the gory details. Is it for technical or artistic reasons specific to the one work, or can you turn it loose on anything?

I almost said Jake's program worked in a Dissociated Press fashion. It doesn't, but I bet that would sound really neat. You could turn a music library into an insane never-ending medley by analyzing the waveforms, finding smooth transitions, and pasting together one-second chunks.

I was going to do a minor NewsBruiser release tonight, but it misbehaves really badly when you install it on Python 2.3, so I'll do it tomorrow.

Comments:

Posted by Timo Virkkala at Fri Jun 11 2004 02:34

What kind of misbehaviour?

Posted by Leonard at Fri Jun 11 2004 11:35

Infinite loop. It goes away if compile to Python bytecode, so I think it's got something to do with the deprecation warnings spawned by fcrypt.

Posted by Jacob at Sat Jun 12 2004 17:49

technically, i can pretty much turn it loose on anything, even itself (picking up input from the mic as it plays out the speakers creates surprising variation from piercing to lulling). it was created specifically for the one anthony braxton album, but playing other music through it produces interesting effects too. kraftwerk is really nice because it almost completely obliterates any rhythm, leaving only the larger structure of each song, and the sounds themselves. i'm working on making it a standalone app that scrambles your cds for you, but i'm also working on about a milliard other things.

Posted by Nathaniel at Sat Jun 12 2004 23:43

If advogato.org was up, I'd find Graydon Hoare's diary entry where he describes a little hack to do dissociated-press type stuff (plus extra scrambling -- feed in the file upside and backwards too, why not) on midi files, where you actually have note information to start with. The punchline is when he's got it playing with some final fantasy music, and it magically transmogrifies the music into an entirely different final fantasy song; apparently he's not the only one to play with such things...