The Magnet 041: One-line algorithmic music
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This week’s issue of The Magnet is focused on smallish items I found interesting. I hope you enjoy them!
One-line algorithmic music
I've been experimenting with ways to get interesting sounds from an Arduino (a low-cost electronic prototyping platform). One of the coolest things I've come across so far is Ville-Matias Heikkilä's algorithmically generated music. These are ever-changing songs made with just one line of code. It is a genre of algorithmic music known as Beatbyte, and people have developed Beatbyte programs for Arduinos and other platforms, including the web.
Check out this browser-based version to try making some one-line algorithmic songs of your own. Truthfully, I have no idea how these one-line formulas actually work. According to this article, the formulas define “a waveform as a function of time, measured here in 1/8000 of a second.” And operators like << shift the bits in the bytes that define the variable t. As you can tell, I’m way out of my league here. If you know how this works, I would appreciate hearing from you. (As I was proofreading this issue, I came across a 2011 paper written by Heikkilä that looks like it has a thorough explanation, but I haven’t read it yet).
The good news is you don't have to know how the formulas work to make sounds. Visit this website and use trial-and-error to write some formulas and see what happens. Suggestions to get started:
return t
return 2*t
return .1*t
return t&96&t>>8
return t&(t>>8)
return t&(t>>8)|(t>>4)
return t++*(t>>9)|(t>>2)Keep tweaking and experimenting. You’ll soon come up with something that sounds like a song!
Here’s a formula that’s full of surprises. It almost sounds like someone is talking.
My goal in learning this is to make a small wooden box that has an Arduino, a speaker, a battery, and a button in it. Each time you press a button it generates a random formula and plays a never-before-heard song that will never be heard again.
Thanks for reading! Mark Frauenfelder writes the Magnet.