A Tune Created for AI

A few days ago, after a morning in the music room I had a track I thought was ok, wanted to upload to YouTube, but couldn't help thinking it really needed some visuals to go with it. Last year, with the help of Claude, I made Hillside, a set of generative visualizations for a set of tracks I'd recorded (live here). It runs in a browser, canvas-based JS. So I dug that out and spent many hours with Codex trying to get it to render to mp4. It really was a gruelling session. Codex went down many blind alleys to get anything properly rendering. In the process managed to mess up the original generative algorithm. But it finally managed to get it to render one of the visuals as a reasonable vid (result here).

I couldn't help anthropomorphising Codex a bit. It'd put so much effort in. So then I asked it to make the kind of generative video setup you'd like to see, tell me what you want and I'll make the sounds. Twenty minutes later Codex had built something, and gave me a brief.

Tides

Tides is intended for quiet, spacious, late-night ambient techno.

Music Brief

• Around 95-115 BPM, with a slow pulse but not sleepy.
• Deep rounded kick, soft sub-bass, and lots of negative space.
• Small delayed percussion clicks, filtered noise, and occasional metallic ticks.
• Warm pads or drones that slowly change harmony.
• No huge drops; more like pressure, drift, and small details emerging from darkness.

There was also a description of the visualization etc, here : tides.md

This morning I created something vaguely along the lines of the brief. I've been having a lot of fun recently creating VST plugins with Codex, so this was a good opportunity to try them out. The sounds are about 50/50 the Downspout Plugins and the modular rack (including neurotic firmware on a module to give the bass a bit of grit).

Then tried Codex's new visualization renderer. Took about an hour and the result was a bit disappointing. Some expanding circles and some very faint wavy lines.

But I saw the potential... Ok, I asked for the circles to be wavy, the faint lines to be more visible, and please add some procedurally generated sea creatures.

Another hour later, this was the result Tidepool. It looks like it might feature in a 20th century kids TV animation. But I'm happy with it.

Novel VST Plugins

I've had a lot of fun over the past year or so doing music experiments with the help of AI assistants. I've had a variety of targets including native apps, browser-based runtimes, a Daisy Seed Eurorack module and lv2 plugins. Most of the material is around Flues on GitHub. All open source, natch.

I have been using the results quite a lot in the music room, in fact the lv2s played a significant role in the making of my new album, Attone.

Attone

I have released a new album, using CD Baby as a distributor so it's now available on all major streaming music outlets.

• Bandcamp
• YouTube
• Spotify

If you remember what a CD-R is, you can burn your own copy using the source files of Attone on GitHub.

Postcraft Update

This is a test.

Rather wonderfully both Codex and Claude have a decent grip on how Transmissions, my pipeliney thing, works. I'm not entirely sure what's being used under the hood, but I did get Claude to create a Skill for creating Transmissions (what I call my pipelines). Claude was then able to build me a feed aggregator using Transmissions as the engine.

I've been using Transmissions-based apps for publishing my blog content for a while now. The source content I write as markdown files in my local filesystem. One app pushes this content off to a remote SPARQL store (Fuseki on my server), another app renders the content as HTML, yet another creates the index pages.

This works ok but an outstanding issue was that each time I ran these apps, every single blog post was processed again. So I just got Codex to modify the pipelines to keep a note of changes. It chose to use a local JSON file for keeping the cache info, which is fine by me. Everything looks like it still functions ok. My tests are a bit haphazard, the best test is to run the thing. For which I need a new blog post. So,

This is a test.

P-Mix

P-Mix is an lv2 plugin that acts kinda like an autonomous DJ. It fades/cuts tracks in a DAW in & out.

Recently I've had quite a good workflow going on in the music room. A lot of experimentation with modular etc, building up tunes. I've got quite systematic about the process for mixing & mastering. I've stuck a few quasi-finished pieces on YouTube (search query "Spike & Wave hyperdata"). But I've got loads of material stuck at a certain point between the build up of layers and the final mix. Typically 8+ tracks, some of them loops, some of them changing over time. But all there in parallel, by default on all the time. Things need to come in and out.

What's really frustrating is that the stage after this, putting icing on things, an effect here and there, novel sample or whatever, is good fun. I just tend to get stuck at this just-beyond-loops phase. Doing this part of the mixing takes ages, and because you're going over the same material over & over again it gets tiring and your judgement quickly goes downhill. Like it's pretty easy to decide on an intro, the first 20 seconds or so of a piece. Then it starts to become a chore and you lose engagement. Ok, I've been attempting to get around this by breaking it up into short sessions, do a bit at a time. But still, the brain fog from repitition descends pretty quickly.

Then it occurred to me - automate it!

I've been doing loads of coding with Claude & Codex AI assistants, including a bunch of (mostly unfinished) lv2 plugins. So I'd got the infrastructure in place - ie. basically workinig example code which the AI can use for reference. Which is fortunate, seeing as I'm really lousy at C/C++. It pleases me immensely that lv2s use Turtle syntax RDF (semweb ftw!).

Here I set a bunch of 8 or so parallel tracks in a loop with the plugin on each of them, and had a play with the modular while it did its thing : Live from the music room

P-Mix : a probabilistic mixer lv2

P-Mix is a very simple lv2 plugin that acts kinda like an autonomous DJ. It fades/cuts audio tracks in a DAW in & out. For when you get stuck with a loop.

Here I set a bunch of 8 or so parallel tracks in a loop with the plugin on each of them, and had a play with the modular while it did its thing.

(There are a bunch of other toys in the repo, various levels of unfinishedness)