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'The Harmonic Algorithm' -- I've finally encoded the musical intuition of J.S.Bach in Haskell/R!!
I've just finished Version 1.0.0.0 of a project that I've been working on for a long time!
A good while ago I set about trying to derive, label and categorise (by hand) every possible combination of electric bass overtones over a chromatic (stopped) root note. This went pretty well but took a lot of manual effort and was unwieldy. Since then I've obsessively pursued this rabbit hole niche within a niche through multiple fields of technical and theoretical practice and what's come out the other side is something quite special (very possibly only to me) ..
This week, I reached a major milestone in implementing the project as an interactive algorithm that you can explore and utilise as a performance/study/composition aid for working with music harmony! It started out as a tool for working with the overtones of an electric bass and the scope has expanded to become a lot more versatile that that (and even in that use case, it can work with any stringed instrument in any tuning). It's pretty handy for all sorts of avenues of creative exploration and instrumental study at this point. On top of that, it incorporates a recommendation system with a 'learned' deterministic intuition for favourable 'next' harmonic choices that ingests data derived from J.S.Bach's Chorale harmonisations and then applies the trained model to data generated by the 'Harmonic Algorithm'.
Don't go expecting any kind of fancy GUI or touchscreen interface .. however it does run on all desktop platforms (but you have to compile it from source!! ha ha ha!!)
I've published it as an open source project and you can check it out in it's current form, including detailed usage examples (with video clips) and installation instructions for anyone inclined to try it out:
https://github.com/OscarSouth/theHarmonicAlgorithm
"The Harmonic Algorithm, written in Haskell and R, generates musical domain specific data inside user defined constraints then filters it down and deterministically ranks it using a tailored Markov Chain model trained on ingested musical data. This presents a unique tool in the hands of the composer or performer which can be used as a writing aid, analysis device, for instrumental study or even in live performance."
Very niche stuff, but I thought it might be interesting for a few inquisitive souls here.
I'm planning to update it with additional visualisation features soon including showing the locations of overtones on an instrument in the currently defined tuning (if one has been defined).
Let me know if anyone has any feedback or comments!
Oscar
Comments
Wow! I don’t really understand what this is but since I practice Bach on a weekly basis I will investigate! Thank you for sharing and I hope to report Bach.... I mean back. ☺️
This is surely worthy of a "Boffin" comment/gif/sticker from @JohnnyGoodyear
Congrats on seeing through your project. Bet it feels great!
Amazing stuff @OscarSouth - way beyond my understanding, although I’m a big fan of many things harmonic and overtoney. And, um, feedback. It sounds like you might have awoken AI, so let’s all be careful. It might anticipate that you’re going to turn it off and play ever more beautiful music, so you can’t.
Thanks for pushing the boundaries and sharing your work man. Respect.
Eli5 plz.
All joking aside I can't seem to see the video links this stuff is amazing. (ignore the part i cut. my net was being slow)
i hope you someday make a longer youtube video showing you use it to compose something
I would but it's all making me feel somewhat faint...
congratulations Oscar. Pleased to hear about your successes.
Thanks for the comments and feedback all! Apologies for not replying immediately -- have been very busy this week and just not got a little time to catch up on replying to stuff.
I actually also only just finished a new feature for it which is one of the things that I've been most excited about implementing -- Generating Random Sequences!!!!
This is the real shit and a much more interesting way to interact with the app (then if you want to see what options are available from any bar, you can just 'jump in' at that point and go into cadence-by-cadence motion again.
As you've probably all assumed by now, it's a project of musical/technical self indulgence. I have some really cool uses planned for it (including in live performance -- triggering iOS software!) which will come gradually over time.
Hope you find it interesting and/or useful! If compiling the program is a little heavy, feel free to ask any inquisitive questions you might have.
Cheers! Yep, this is a development of a looooot of music analysis and musical exploration made into reality -- never imagined I'd actually make the thing in reality when I was just sketching musical notes on paper. One thing leads to another and next thing you know..
Thanks very much! Feel free to ask any questions on technical or music geekery. Music analysis is my first expertise before the technical aspects (which were really driven and pushed past the limits in my desire to make my music analysis concepts real).
I'm definitely planning to move from 'user-guide' territory into making videos demonstrating performance and composition with the app. I've been asked for this from every angle! Haha (music makers, technical, music tech etc.). I'm actually planning to perform with this thing (wait and see what I've got planned..) and that'll be documented for sure.
I'm nowhere near witty enough to come up with a snappy retorts to these!
Cheers!!
Q: Will that work on a Windows PC
A: Yep, it should work on any Linux, Windows or Mac machine -- it does require compiling from source at this point (but that's not too bad due to Haskell's nicely designed 'stack' tool, which builds dependencies for you)
Q: Is it possible to output as MIDI file?
A: Not yet, but MIDI out and MIDI export is a feature that I'd like to include long term. I'd also like to add MIDI read (IE, load a MIDI file and it'll 'learn' the harmonic intuition of that file) which should actually be pretty easy -- the pitchclass analysis module I wrote for processing musical data can already perform most tasks required.
Please add any feature requests you may have as Issues on the repo for the open source project:
https://github.com/OscarSouth/theHarmonicAlgorithm/issues
I'll slowly get through adding them over time.
I'm definitely going to make some musical examples that focus on using the program rather than how it works.
That's actually already possible on the backend with the music processing 'pitchclass analysis' machinery that I've already written in the 'MusicData' module! It's something that I'd also love to add and would be very cool. The difficult part for this is writing a 'realtime analysis' mode for the app -- it'd probably require implementing an interactive environment beyond the present command line interface.
Please add this to the Issues page on the open source project repo if ya can:
https://github.com/OscarSouth/theHarmonicAlgorithm/issues
Thanks again to everyone who checked this out or left a comment!
Oscar
I’ll look into making a simplified installation process but might not be immediate (my background is 100% music so technical aspects are learn-as-I-go). I’d actually like to make a web app later on — that’d be a logical solution to let people play with it.