Posts Tagged remix
The Wub Machine
Posted by Paul in remix, Uncategorized on May 24, 2011
We swing both ways
Perhaps one of the most frequently asked questions about Tristan’s Swinger is whether it can be used to ‘Un-swing’ a song. Can you take a song that already swings and straighten it out? Indeed, the answer is yes – we can swing both ways - but it is harder to unswing than it is to swing. Ammon on Happy Blog, the Happy Blog has given de-swinging a go with some success with his de-swinging of Revolution #1. Read his post and have a listen at Taking the swing out of songs. I can’t wait for the day when we can turn on the TV to watch and listen to MTV-Unswung.
Frasier does Nine Inch Nails
Posted by Paul in code, fun, remix, The Echo Nest on June 5, 2010
Oh My – Musician Josh Millard has recreated The Downward Spiral using nothing but audio from the NBC sitcom Frasier. So wrong, and yet, so right. Josh has the whole remixed album plus a video on his blog:
Sweet Child O’Mine – Vienna Style
Posted by Paul in Music, remix, research, The Echo Nest on May 24, 2010
I was wondering how far one could go with the time-stretching stuff and still make something musical. Here’s an attempt to turn a rock anthem into a waltz. It is a bit rough in a few places, especially the beginning – but I think it settles into a pretty nice groove.
The Swinger
Posted by Paul in Music, remix, The Echo Nest on May 21, 2010
Every Breath You Take
Money for Nothing
Cream
I Will
Update – a few more tracks -by request:
Enter Sandman
Daft Punk’s Around the world
Sweet Child O’ Mine
(one of my favs)
Don’t Stop Believin’
White Rabbit
(this one is hypnotic)
Swinger uses the new Dirac time-stretching capabilities of Echo Nest remix. Source code is available in the samples directory of remix.
Be sure to check out some of the other Music Hack Day hacks like Six Degrees of Black Sabbath, Jason’s Songbird Visualizer or the Artikulator.
Earworm and Capsule at Music Hack Day San Francisco
Posted by Paul in events, Music, remix, The Echo Nest, web services on May 14, 2010
Capsule takes a list of tracks and optimizes the song transitions by reordering them and applying automatic beat matching and cross fading to give you a seamless playlist. It is really neat stuff. Here’s an example of a capsule between two Bob Marley songs:
It makes a nice little Bob Marley medley.
Jason writes about Capsule and Earworm and some other new features in remix in his new (and rather awesome) blog: Running With Data – Earworm and Capsule. Check it out.
Bad Romance – the memento edition
Posted by Paul in code, events, remix, The Echo Nest on March 18, 2010
At SXSW I gave a talk about how computers can help make remixing music easier. For the talk I created a few fun remixes. Here’s one of my favorites. It’s a beat-reversed version of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. The code to create it is here: vreverse.py
Here comes the antiphon
Posted by Paul in Music, remix, The Echo Nest on February 25, 2010
I’m gearing up for the SXSW panel on remix I’m giving in a couple of weeks. I thought I should veer away from ‘science experiments’ and try to create some remixes that sound musical. Here’s one where I’ve used remix to apply a little bit of a pre-echo to ‘Here Comes the Sun’. It gives it a little bit of a call and answer feel:
The core (choir?) code is thus:
for bar in enumerate(self.bar):
cur_data = self.input[bar]
if last:
last_data = self.input[last]
mixed_data = audio.mix(cur_data, last_data, mix=.3)
out.append(mixed_data)
else:
out.append(cur_data)
last = bar
Rearranging the Machine
Posted by Paul in Music, remix, The Echo Nest on January 5, 2010
Last month I used Echo Nest remix to rearrange a Nickelback song (See From Nickelback to Bickelnack) by replacing each sound segment with another similar sounding segment. Since Nickelback is notorious for their self-similarity, a few commenters suggested that I try the remix with a different artist to see if the musicality stems from the remix algorithm or from Nickelback’s self-similarity. I also had a few tweaks to the algorithm that I wanted to try out, so I gave it go. Instead of remixing Nickelback I remixed the best selling Christmas song of 2009 Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name’.
Here’s the remix using the exact same algorithm that was used to make the Bickelnack remix:
Like the Bickelnack remix – this remix is still rather musical. (Source for this remix is here: vafroma.py)
A true shuffle: One thing that is a bit unsatisfying about this algorithm is that it is not a true reshuffling of the input. Since the remix algorithm is looking for the nearest match, it is possible for single segment to appear many times in the output while some segments may not appear at all. For instance, of the 1140 segments that make up the original RATM Killing in the Name, only 706 are used to create the final output (some segments are used as many as 9 times in the output). I wanted to make a version that was a true reshuffling, one that used every input segment exactly once in the output, so I changed the inner remix loop to only consider unused segments for insertion. The algorithm is a greedy one, so segments that occur early in the song have a bigger pool of replacement segments to draw on. The result is that as the song progresses, the similarity of replacement segments tends to drop off.
I was curious to see how much extra error there was in the later segments, so I plotted the segment fitting error. In this plot, the red line is the fitting error for the original algorithm and the green line is the fitting error for shuffling algorithm. I was happy to see that for most of the song, there is very little extra error in the shuffling algorithm, things only get bad in the last 10% of the song.
You can hear see and hear the song decay as the pool of replacement segments diminish. The last 30 seconds are quite chaotic. (Remix source for this version is here: vafroma2.py)
More coherence: Pulling song segments from any part of a song to build a new version yields fairly coherent audio, however, the remixed video can be rather chaotic as it seems to switch cameras every second or so. I wanted to make a version of the remix that would reduce the shifting of the camera. To do this, I gave slight preference to consecutive segments when picking the next segment. For example, if I’ve replaced segment 5 with segment 50, when it is time to replace segment 6, I’ll give segment 51 a little extra chance. The result is that the output contains longer sequences of contiguous segments. – nevertheless no segment is ever in its original spot in the song. Here’s the resulting version:
I find this version to be easier to watch. (Source is here: vafroma3.py).
Next experiments along these lines will be to draw segments from a large number of different songs by the same artist, to see if we can rebuild a song without using any audio from the source song. I suspect that Nickelback will again prove themselves to be the masters of self-simlarity:
Here’s the original, un-remixed version of RATM- Killing in the name:
Echo Nest analysis and visualization for Dopplereffekt – Scientist
Posted by Paul in fun, remix, The Echo Nest, visualization on December 20, 2009
