Does anyone (perhaps a music theorist) know what rules determine what notes sound well following each other/together?
I find an interesting parallel between 1/2/4/8 repeating beats/parts in songs, and binary...
I find an interesting parallel between 1/2/4/8 repeating beats/parts in songs, and binary...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony
tl;dr: Frequencies that are related by some simple ratios are defined as "intervals" which are organized into scales. A handful of those make up the vast majority of popular western music and "sound good together".
I'm finding the tunes the least successful element here. They sound like a fairly naive Markov sequence/chord spine mashup, with none of the character of really good tunes.
The sounds/production are much better. The drum parts are midway between the two.
>I find an interesting parallel between 1/2/4/8 repeating beats/parts in songs, and binary...
There's more to it than that.
Good algo-comp is PhD-level work. Kemal Ebcioglu, who made one of the best efforts to date, had to add a lot of hand-rolled heuristics to an expert system that was trying to produce classical counterpoint. He was last seen working for IBM research on compilers and architectures for parallelism - a very smart guy.
It's easy to underestimate how hard the problem is.
In building Jukedeck, we're applying our own theories about what makes good music. And, like any musical composition, it's an experiment!
Have you thought about applying also common patterns found in the best selling hits? Hooktheory has a nice DB for this:
re: what determines what sounds good, in some sense you can read up on music theory for this (scales / keys). in a more basic sense ("why is this sad and this happy?") it's actually an open and actively researched question in the physics of music. it's anyone's guess, really, why certain melodies are pleasant. is it a physical/structural/formal feature of the sound itself? is it a feature of our psychology or neurological makeup? who knows.