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Vaniver comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
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I'm a college student studying music composition and computer science. You can hear some of my compositions on my SoundCloud page (it's only a small subset of my music, but I made sure to put a few that I consider my best at the top of the page). In the computer science realm, I'm into game development, so I'm participating in this thing called One Game A Month whose name should be fairly self-explanatory (my February submission is the one that's most worth checking out - the other 2 are kind of lame...).
For pretty much as long as I can remember, I've enjoyed pondering difficult/philosophical/confusing questions and not running away from them, which, along with having parents well-versed in math and science, led me to gradually hone my rationality skills over a long period of time without really having a particular moment of "Aha, now I'm a rationalist!". I suppose the closest thing to such a moment would be about a year ago when I discovered HPMoR (and, shortly thereafter, this site). I've found LW to be pretty much the only place where I am consistently less confused after reading articles about difficult/philosophical/confusing questions than I am before.
Welcome!
Have you done any algorithmic composition?
I did this and I might try doing a few more pieces like it. You have to click somewhere on the screen to start/stop it.
Fascinating, thanks!
A project that's been kicking around in the back of my head for a while is emotional engineering through algorithmic music; it would be great to have a way to generate somewhat novel happy high-energy music during coding that won't sap any attention (I'm sort of reluctant to talk to musicians about it, though, because it feels like telling a chef you'd like a way to replace them with a machine that dispenses a constant stream of sugar :P).
I would also love this. I'm in constant deficit of high-energy music for coding or other similar activities, and often it can take more work finding good music for it than all the coding work I want to do while listening to it (or, conversely, it can take much longer to find good music than the music lasts).
One thing I think would be cool would be some sort of audio-generating device/software/thing that allows arbitrary levels of specificity. So, on one extreme, you could completely specify a fully deterministic stream of sound, and, on the other extreme, you could specify nothing and just say "make some sound". Or you could go somewhere in between and specify something along the lines of "play music for X minutes, in a manner evoking emotion Y, using melody Z as the main theme of the piece".
Now that you mention this, I do remember reading some years ago about a machine-learning composition project that had the algorithm generate random streams and learn what music people liked by crowd-sourcing feedback.
I think what you've described is a great idea, and I would pay for it.
Ideally, it would let me have different-styled streams dependent on what I want to do with the music / what activity I'm doing while listening. Triple bonus points if it can consume an existing piece of music to learn more about some particular style of stream that I want.
There have been a lot o' such projects. I like some of the tracks produced by DarwinTunes.