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Monday, September 2, 2019

Algorithmic Music Software Coding Notes, Random Stuff, and More

- I dabble in computer/algorithmic music form time to time. These are some of my notes from a while back (I use my blog as a backup of stuff that I'm sometimes working on)(these notes are from a long while back/maybe even years? so if they're not entirely up to date please excuse me)(sorry, if these notes seem a little bit difficult to read. They're mostly for my own reference):
- I was going to build something purely using Bash/Sox but time and other projects got the better of me
- the hard part is finding the right samples. It's actually really hard to find sample packs that are good? Eventually, I got sick of trying to find samples that I liked that I just sort of stuck with what's free and easily available. Sound results were secondary
drum loop samples
percussion sound sample kit zip
free percussion sound sample kit zip
- obvious thing is to extract get samples from existing programs out there. The problem I have with this technique is that some formats are difficult/tedious to extract, reverse engineer, etc... eJay programs themselves have tens of thousands of samples. If you use a macro type solution to extract who knows how long extraction would take. Realistically, reverse engineering the file format would make more sense
ejay samples to wav format
ejay pxd files
decode algo for pxd files
Can you convert .pxd files to .wav??
reverse eJay Dll´s
- then it's a case of find a structure for songs that actually make sense. Looked online for a starting point. The problem is that there are lots of online options now not so many that are offline
sox music sequencer github
automated song remix github
wubmachine offline alternative
- I was mainly looking at sample based music. This requires detection of sample key, timing, etc... There are some tools to allow you to do this but not many
detect song key linux cli mp3
auto mashup sox github
auto remix sox github 
echonest alternative
open source music daw
- I wanted to create something similar to the following. Borderline DAW type stuff but offline and more basic
cli music tracker
linux cli music daw
auto mashup music python site:github.com
music mashup ableton max4live
windows music mashup software
app inventor music masher
- the obvious problem with using Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning that everyone else is using is that it will be no different...
automated music masher github.com
music generator github.com
music generator max4live
music generator site:github.com
music generator site:github.com
- I've actually built stuff like this...
max4live create verse
max4live free plugins
alternative to band in a box
automated edm music
max4live edm generator
audo create edm ableton plugin
- if you've worked with eJay or any DAW you'd understand that switching around sounds is the easiest method to start building alternative songs/mashups. You need a sound library and a similary checking system to do this
find similar sounds github
sound similiarity checker linux cli
similar sound check program
check similar sound github
check similar sound site:github.com
max4live mashup song
sample based music github
music paraphraser
music paraphraser github
- I actually have some basic code as well but it just doesn't sound great at the moment. I'll release it at another time if I ever come with something worthwhile

Random Stuff:
- as usual thanks to all of the individuals and groups who purchase and use my goods and services
- latest in science and technology
Reputationaire
sales as a service
- latest in finance and politics
Hong Kong activist who cut his teeth protesting abroad, calls for Western support
China issues first veto on company's application for listing on Star tech board
- latest in defense and intelligence
- latest in animal news
Steel the husky has ‘striking’ blue eyes — and he’s looking for a forever home
- latest in music and entertainment

Random Quotes:
- According to Song Xiaoquan, one of the researchers on the Guanlan project, the satellite would render the upper layer of the oceans "more or less transparent," cited by SCMP.

"It will change almost everything," Song said.

For more than half a century, weapons designers around the globe have been attempting to build a light detection and ranging (lidar) laser that would target submerged submarines.

When a laser beam hits a submarine, some of the light-energy pulses bounce back. Those pulses are detected by sensors and analyzed by software to discern a target's location, speed and physical dimensions.

In real-world applications, however, lidar technology is easily affected by a device's power limitations, as well as cloud, fog, murky water and marine life. In addition, because a laser scatters when it enters a body of a water, getting a precise fix on a target can be tricky.

The United States and the former Soviet Union previously attained maximum detection depths of less than 100 meters, SCMP reported.

Research funded by NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have extended that range. For instance, DARPA has developed a device that can be attached to aircraft, detecting targets at depths of at least 200 meters.

It is not yet known whether the Chinese team will be able to achieve deeper depths with their technology.
- Cows don’t normally get a say in how they spend their days. The first milking often comes at dawn, where they form a cow conga line to their milking stations. Then comes feeding, then resting, then more milking (and perhaps a wander in the pasture, if they’re allowed to graze in open fields at all). Commercial farming operations repeat this cycle two to three times a day, with each cow having to abide by the farmers’ schedules, not their own.

But what happens when you leave it up to the cow to decide how often she wants to be milked, and whether she feels like eating, drinking, or simply relaxing?

Aðalsteinn Hallgrímsson and his brother Gardar own a dairy farm in northern Iceland, just outside the city of Akureyri. They know the answers to those questions—and others you’d never to think to ask—thanks to the robots they’ve installed in their barn.

In 2007, the Hallgrímssons rebuilt their barn from the ground up, spending kr160 million ($1.46 million) on technologies such as milking robots, an automatic feeding system, and cleaning robots. The investment quickly paid off, says Aðalsteinn’s son, Einar örn Aðalsteinnson. Within a year, their 80 cows were producing 30% more milk and the rate of infections had plummeted, cutting the farm’s veterinarian bills from kr2 million a year to under kr0.5 million.

Their success was because of one simple factor: The cows are much happier now.

When one of their cows wants to be milked, she walks to the center of the barn to one of the three self-milking Lely machines. She enters the machine—a gated, cow-size booth—and first has her teats inspected and cleaned. Next, the robot attaches its equipment to extract her milk while the cow chows down on some cow candy: tasty corn pellets supplemented with various vitamins and minerals. The whole process takes 10 minutes or less.
- “Once such superhumans appear, there are going to be significant political problems with the unimproved humans, who won’t be able to compete,” suggests the late physicist and author Stephen Hawking in The Sunday Times. “Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving themselves at an ever-increasing rate. If the human race manages to redesign itself, it will probably spread out and colonize other planets and stars.”

Hawking has caused an uproar by suggesting a new race of superhumans could develop from wealthy people choosing to edit their DNA. “There is no time to wait for Darwinian evolution to make us more intelligent and better natured. But we are now entering a new phase of what might be called self-designed evolution, in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. We have now mapped DNA, which means we have read “the book of life”, so we can start writing in corrections.”

Hawking, who died in March, presented the possibility that genetic engineering could create a new species of superhuman that could destroy the rest of humanity. The essays, published in the Sunday Times, were written in preparation for a book that will be published on Tuesday.

“At first,” Hawking writes, “these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects — such as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, which are controlled by single genes and so are fairly easy to identify and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes, and it will be much more difficult to find them and work out the relations between them.

“Nevertheless, I am sure that during this century people will discover how to modify both intelligence and instincts such as aggression. Laws will probably be passed against genetic engineering with humans. But some people won’t be able to resist the temptation to improve human characteristics, such as size of memory, resistance to disease and length of life.”
- The privacy-focused Internet search engine DuckDuckGo has achieved a high of 30 million search queries a day recently, the company behind it says.

In a tweet, DuckDuckGo said it had taken seven years for the search engine to reach 10 million private searches in one day.

It took another two years to double that number but only a year to reach 30 million. In contrast, Google handles about 3.5 billion search queries a day but aggressively spies on its users.

A graph issued by DuckDuckGo showed that search queries had begun to spike at certain points when privacy-related events happened.

Traffic rose at the time when Google changed its privacy policy in 2012, when the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden made his revelations about surveillance, when privacy issues were revealed in Safari in 2005.

A further spike, a big one, occurred when there were revelations of privacy issues with Firefox.

As DuckDuckGo is not as aggressive in indexing queries as Google or Bing, its search is less comprehensive.

But as the company says, it does not track users when they use privacy mode or leave it, does not target advertising and stores no personal information.
- The Truth Comes Out: Nikki Haley Busted Taking Kickbacks From Donors
The reason why Donald Trump’s UN Ambassador Nikki Haley abruptly resigned this week just became a little clearer, as new reports indicate that she was the beneficiary of multiple kickbacks from wealthy Republican donors. If these stories and the lawsuits around them are fruitful, it could put an end to any future political ambitions that Haley was harboring. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
The Ring of Fire Network
- The decision to leave roughly $7.5 billion in aircraft in the path of a hurricane raised eyebrows, including among defense analysts who say the Pentagon’s entire high-tech strategy continues to make its fighter jets vulnerable to weather and other mishaps when they are grounded for repairs.

“This becomes sort of a self-defeating cycle where we have $400 million aircraft that can’t fly precisely because they are $400 million aircraft,” said Dan Grazier, a defense fellow at Project on Government Oversight. “If we were buying simpler aircraft then it would be a whole lot easier for the base commander to get these aircraft up and in working order, at least more of them.”

Reports on the number of aircraft damaged ranged from 17 to 22 or about 10 percent of the Air Force’s F-22 fleet of 187.

The Air Force stopped buying F-22s, considered the world’s most advanced fighter jets, in 2012. The aircraft is being replaced by the F-35, another high-tech but slightly less-expensive aircraft.

Later in the tour, at an emergency command center in Georgia, Mr. Trump said the damage to the F-22s couldn’t be avoided because the aircraft were grounded and the storm moved quickly.

“We’re going to have a full report. There was some damage, not nearly as bad as we first heard,” he said when asked about the F-22s, which cost about $339 million each.

“I’m always concerned about cost. I don’t like it,” Mr. Trump said.

Still, the president remains a fan of the high-tech fighter jet.

“The F-22 is one of my all-time favorites. It is the most beautiful fighter jet in the world. One of the best,” he said.
- “It’s just really important to give the moose as much space as possible,” Cannon said.

Wildlife experts suggest using your thumb to determine a safe distance. If you can close one eye and cover most of the animal’s body with your thumb, you’re likely far enough away.

There are several warning signs if you get too close.

“If the hair on the back of his neck stands up that’s a signal that they’re starting to get agitated,” Cannon said. “If they start to change their behavior in any way or they pin their ears back or their hackles come up then you know you’re too close and it’s time to back off quickly.”

If a moose charges, do not stand your ground. It is best to try and get behind something like a car, house or building until the moose backs off and leaves the area.
- “The number of arms sales being negotiated now is in the highest [level] ever registered in the history of the United States,” Rickard said.

He said US arms manufacturers have outdone all other gun manufacturers worldwide by far. 

“Americans have outsold other countries by 10 to 1 in international sales of arms industry,” he pointed out.

Rickard said the “military-industrial complex”, which is run by former military officers who all graduated from the United States Military Academy also known as West Point, see selling more weapons as the solution to reviving the ailing US economy. “Buying and selling weapons is all they know, and so, for every nail, all they see is hammers.”

“This is the sad state of affairs American foreign policy has. It has basically been run by the corrupt military industrial complex,”  he concluded.

Market Consolidation/Neo-Feudalism, Random Stuff, and More

- it never occured to me until recently how consolidated things in the world were in the global market place. In this post we'll take a ...