:Artwork

Musica ∞ Eternale

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What it is

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Musica ∞ Eternale is endless background music composed on the fly from random
numbers. Every note, every drum hit and every little choice comes from
/dev/urandom, so the music never ends and never repeats.

The idea is simple: what happens if you let pure chance write the music, but give
it a few gentle rules about how music likes to behave? The answer turns out to be
surprisingly pleasant: a calm, warm, slightly melancholic groove at 120 beats per
minute that you can leave running in the background for hours.

How it sounds

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It’s easy-listening pop in a minor key: a soft lead melody, a round bass line,
drums, airy pads and a twinkling arpeggio, all softened with a little reverb and
echo. The music is arranged into pieces that have their own key, chord
progression, groove and lead sound, and each piece has an intro, verses, a
chorus with a catchy hook, and a quiet breakdown. When a piece ends, the music
drifts to a nearby key with a short drum fill and starts the next one.

Randomness picks the notes, but the rules keep them musical: melodies follow the
chords, choruses answer their own questions, the groove swings a little, and the
timing is “humanized” so it feels played rather than programmed.

How you listen

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Musica ∞ Eternale is a tiny web server with a page that has one big button: ▶ to
play, ■ to stop. Open it on your phone, tablet or computer, press play, and the
music starts.

– It keeps playing with your phone’s screen locked, and the lock screen shows
the usual play and pause controls.
– Everyone who listens hears the same endless stream at the same time, like a
little radio station that makes up its music on the spot.
– When nobody is listening, it quietly pauses and waits.
– If the connection drops for a moment, the page reconnects on its own and the
music carries on.

>Why

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Partly curiosity, partly for the joy of it. There’s something calming about
music that was never written down and will never play the same way twice.
Every time you press play, you hear something nobody has heard before, and
nobody will hear again.

Flam3D

Flam3D is flam3 with the Apophysis 7X “3D hack” added, so it renders the 3D flames of Apophysis 7X as well as classic 2D flames. It adds:

a z coordinate and the 3D camera (cam_pitch, cam_yaw, cam_perspective, cam_zpos, cam_dof)
Apophysis’ pre_/post_ variation ordering and var_color
the 34 built-in 3D variations of Apophysis 7X, the 18 3D variations of its plugin pack, and the circlize, Spherical3D, scry_3D and zeta3D plugins
Apophysis’ handling of xaos dead ends (an xform whose links to all xforms are 0 ends the batch of iterations instead of aborting the render)

Github page

MuseRND

MUseRND composes music from pure randomness. Every note of the melody, every chord, bass note, drum hit and extra instrument starts life as random bytes read from /dev/urandom. An evolutionary search then breeds those bytes, keeping the variations that a set of music-theory detectors rate as more musical, until a song emerges. Nothing is copied from existing music and no notes are written by rules: the rules only judge, the randomness creates.
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Songs are saved as Standard MIDI and uncompressed MusicXML, ready for any DAW, notation program or synthesizer, together with the genome (the evolved bytes) so every song can be rebuilt exactly. A browser UI lets you compose, listen, edit and keep a library of songs.

Github page

FFarmgo

FFarmgois a cross-platform port of Filter Farm, Kees van Prooijen’s evolutionary image filter for Adobe Photoshop, written in pure Go.
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Filter Farm does not ship a fixed set of effects. It grows filters. Each filter is a random expression tree built from a weighted grammar of operators: noise, plasma fractals, blends, switches, curves and coordinate warps. The tree’s leaves read the source picture, so a filter warps, recolours and textures the image it is applied to. You look at a grid of nine filters, rate the ones you like, and breed the next generation. The grammar learns from your ratings, and the filters drift toward your taste.

Github page

Timelapse

A small Go app that turns a video into a time lapse by blending frames together: every second of footage (one group of frames) becomes a single blended frame, using any of ffmpeg’s blend modes.