HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

How about just using C?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o

Maybe /s, maybe not…

Listening to a PDP-7 with an AM radio isn't exactly ByteBeat (since you're technically only allowed one line of code), but it sure sounds a lot like it:

Meet Bytebeat: A Brand New Electronic Music Genre

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkzakx/meet-bytebeat-a-br...

>Become a slave to the algorhythm.

>Heard about the latest computer music genre sweeping the internet? It’s called “bytebeat” and if this comes as news to you, don’t despair, the thing’s only about five months old, so you’re still ahead of the curve. Bytebeat is algorithmic music created from one line of code and was discovered/invented while Finnish low-tech artist and programmer Ville-Matias Heikkila (aka Viznut) and his friends were experimenting with the computer programming language C code and creating one line formulas that could produce an audio output (see below).

Bytebeat: Music from very short programs - the 3rd iteration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o

Bytebeat - Music from math formulas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25aVWtNcAm0

The AM music is unsurprisingly similar to bytebeat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o

⬐ DonHopkins

Wow cool, that's like a daemon spawn between Munching Squares, Stephen Anthony Malinowski's Music Animation Machine, and the Obfuscated C Contest!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATbMw6X3T40

> Points near the origin have dark colors, with the color assigned to a complex number z approaching black as z approaches 0. Points far from the origin are light, with the color of z approaching white as |z| approaches infinity. Every complex number has a different color in this picture, so a complex number can be uniquely specified by giving its color.

So I was wondering if this approach could also be useful in the context of floats and integers. The implementation becomes simpler in many ways (we only have a finite number of possible values to consider).

For example, start with a unique mapping of 8-bit integers to a continuous colour ramp. I suppose the easiest option would be to start in the top left, then go from left to right, top to bottom, resulting in a 16x16 image.

If we then take a formula that also returns an 8-bit value, map every possible input to an output, and show the results as an image, it should make it easy to see where we have an integer overflow, for example (if we see sudden jumps from very bright to dark or the other way around).

Then I realised: I have seen this in the wild! It's used all over the place in the demo-scene. For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o

http://wurstcaptures.untergrund.net/music/?oneliner=((t*(%22...

Aside, this also reminds me of Gustafson's closure plots for comparing his number encoding to standard floating points, although it's not really the same thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0Y1uAA-2Y&t=33m47s

⬐ hrrld

This looks fun! Has anyone experimented with trying to avoid aliasing?

I would guess it would not make the programs _much_ longer, and could drastically 'improve' the output quality. I put improve in quotes because the gnarly artifact-y nature of this does provide some of the charm.

⬐ mntmn

Related: "Making music with a C compiler [SIGINT13]", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCEUyx-SxPw

⬐ ArekDymalski

I love experimenting with Ibniz however insufficient documentation and huge gaps in my skills, make the progress painfully slow.

Did anyone here have any success in creating something musical with it?

⬐ torkable

"music"

⬐ 0xdeadbeefbabe

Reminds me of listening to a wobbly industrial fan laying down some funky beats.

Make sure to watch some of the later videos too as viznut added some visualizations as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o

⬐ erikano

Thanks for the link, very cool.

>I'm glad you like it. The sound is generated purely by a JavaScript function returning sample values

i feel like this belongs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o - not in a DAW kinda sense, though

Reminds me of those:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtQdIYUtAHg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlrs2Vorw2Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o

:)

⬐ crucialfelix

Yeah I remember those ! In fact I did some bit shift melody stuff myself in supercollider based on those and some other code.

One of the sc people released an iPhone app that let's you write bitshift based melodies.

The early stuff that supercolliders creator James McCartney did really set the style for short, mathematically elegant music. It's really a great language for it. You can do operations on arrays, and do interesting multichannel expansion.

I think the theory behind this is a great deal more interesting than that video lets on. The idea started out as simple C programs piping characters to a UNIX audio device. But it's grown since then, now there's a web page that lets you create audio with Javascript expressions[1] (one of my favorite tracks from this scene was generated that way[2]).

There's some good blog posts about the origins of this[3], and music theory behind it[4]; both of which will go into more detail than I'd care to for a HN comment[3].

[1] http://wurstcaptures.untergrund.net/music/

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... (5m 13s)

[3] http://countercomplex.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/algorithmic-sym...

[4] http://countercomplex.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/some-deep-analy...