florilegiumson

Living in the PE side of software, with its EBITDA and other metrics, poorly researched product initiatives, senseless firefighting, and toxic bro cultures, it's nice to be reminded some of the reasons I got into this. Thank you.

“As it is, the new computational model is the first to generate realistic sound based on the laws of physics and acoustics.”

Ouch: this is completely inaccurate. Physical modeling has its roots in the 80s and Stefan Bilbao has been doing FDM based methods for over 20 years. I think he discusses fem in numerical sound sysnthesis

AI music generators are not my cup of tea, but it was fun trying to get it to create this fever dream machine. https://www.flowmusic.app/space/2dc0e63f-a27c-4f4f-91c9-60e8...

I especially love the glitchy ui sounds, although I suspect it's hardly intentional.

Nicolas Collins is actually a different person: https://www.nicolascollins.com/handmade.htm

It has reignited my passion for coding by making it so I don't have to use my coding muscle as much during the day to improve our technologically boring product.

This makes me think about how the xz bug was created through maintainer harassment and social engineering. The security implications are interesting

As a musician, I find there are a lot of obsessions one can succumb to that can lead to mastery. There are those who are obsessed with the body and it’s perfect positioning and movement those who indulge in extensive experimentation (trying everything), those who listen to absolutely everything, those who meditatively repeat and repeat (sometimes at glacial tempi), and then there are those who collect every musical idea they can and gift listeners with only the best treasures they encounter. AI musicianship, if it is something that can be mastered, probably would rely on some combination of the above. It’s going to suck for a while, certainly, as there hasn’t been time for someone to put in their 10000 hours

I like the idea of reimagining the whole stack so as to make AI more productive, but why stop at languages (as x86 asm is still a language)? Why not the operating system? Why not the hardware layer? Why not LLM optimized verilog, or an AI tuned HDL?

If AI is really likely to cause a mass extinction event, then non-proliferation becomes critical as it was in the case with nuclear weapons. Otherwise, what does it really mean for AI to "replace people" outside of people needing to retool or socially awkward people having to learn to talk to people better? AI surely will change a lot, but I don't understand the steps needed to get to the highly existential threat that has become a cliché in every "Learn CLAUDE/MCP" ad I see. A period of serious unemployment, sure, but this article is talking about population collapse, as if we are all only being kept alive and fed to increase shareholder value for people several orders of magnitude more intelligent than us, and with more opposable thumbs. Do people think 1.2B people are going to die because of AI? What is the economy but people?

Thank you: these are excellent.

Really cool project. I love the animations that go with the songs.

I’d go through all of the chord progressions and make sure they actually match what is being played. There are quite a few errors. Happens to everyone.

Also, you and everyone else should remember that while the band is mostly playing power chords and omitting the fifths, what Cobain sings is part of the chord as it’s heard. This means that, for example, a lot of songs do sound major, Smells like teen spirit is probably in F minor.

I find determining key in popular music to be tricky. Most progressions consist of something like 4 chords, and there isn’t the teleology you see in something like Tin Pan Alley or Chopin to give the sense of where one is to arrive. Even the Axis of Awesome progression can be heard a major or minor depending on how you end the song.

Really cool to see GPUs applied to sound synthesis. Didn’t realize that all one needed to do to keep up with the audio thread was to batch computations at the size of the audio thread. I’m fascinated by the idea of doing the same kind of thing for continua in the manner of Stefan Bilbao: https://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Sound-Synthesis-Difference-...

Although I wonder if mathematically it’s the same thing …

L-systems were proposed for music even earlier. Here's a link to an article from 1986: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/score-generatio...

It definitely is not a glorified PRNG. The idea is that you can create patterns that have both variety and repetition with them. I don't like the results, generally, but they are not random.

The author is right that there is nothing new about making music with AI. However, earlier uses of AI were for symbol manipulation, whereas currently AI has the potential to be a new kind of sound synthesis method. I’ve heard demos where sounds come from these interstitial regions of latent space and so it sounds like I’m listening to two things at once. I wonder if quantum computers will have the ability to do something similarly freaky.

It’s really cool to use quantum computers to compose music, but I’d love to see them used for things other than control of “frequency modulation (FM), additive synthesis, and granular synthesis.”