The Amanuensis: Automated Songwriting and Recording | Blog #2 | Birth of a Song and the Battle for Its Evolution

The Amanuensis is an automated songwriting and recording system aimed at ridding the process of anything left-brained, so one need never leave a creative, spontaneous and improvisational state of mind, from the inception of the song until its final master. The program will construct a cohesive song structure, using the best of what you give it, looping around you and growing in real-time as you play. All you have to do is jam and fully written songs will flow out behind you wherever you go.

If you want to try it out, please get a hold of me! Playtesters wanted! You only need to be a musician who likes to jam, no programming knowledge required.

Repository

This also happens to be an open-source project, if you'd like to get involved: https://github.com/to-the-sun/amanuensis

Introduction

The purpose of this blog is to promote the project, by giving people a first-hand view of it in action, go over features and discuss the current state of development.

In this video you will see a demo of some very basic use of the system and have the fundamentals of its behavior described. A very brief overview of my current setup is given and at the end there is a recording of the work-in-progress song produced from the session.

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Demo video

I wanted to do this blog post in particular because the demo video of this run-through illustrates well how songs are built in The Amanuensis and grow, looping, over time.

First of all, you can see that track 1 is set up to record from my interface's audio input 3 and that it is being run by MIDI from the same source. This MIDI is being generated by The Singing Stream, which is the small window in the bottom right corner (I'll go into this in more detail in future blogs). All you need to know for now is that the backbone of my current set up is a mic plugged into this input for me to beatbox into.

Currently my videos are not recording the monitoring of the input, so you can't hear my beatboxing until it's already been recorded, but that actually works well for the purposes of this demo. Everything you hear is the song itself so it's easy to track its exact progress as it grows.

A circular "recording" icon appears next to each track while it is recording. Recording is autonomous, meaning you as the player do not choose when it happens, and the ever-present task in development is in making the system "smarter" about what it chooses to record or doesn't.

Once a span of audio has been captured a rectangle with rounded edges appears behind the track, denoting its exact position in the song. These spans are in a constant struggle with each other to make it into the song. Watch this battle as it unfolds in track 1: keep track of the moment in the song that the recording icon turns on and then where it turns off again. If that span of time overlaps shorter rectangles of already recorded audio (or more specifically, if its addition would increase the overall average length of spans) it will successfully find its way in.

In the early stages the beats of the song may seem disjointed, but in this way things eventually get smoothed out and the song evolves towards a state of higher quality.

But wait, wouldn't it just be easier to use a DAW to record a nice clean take of beatboxing and go from there?

Well sure, if that's your thing. But that's not what The Amanuensis is about. Personally, I find recording music in the traditional manner feels like work, whereas this feels like a game. It's fun, and that right there is the whole point. My primary goal in maintaining this blog and creating these demos is to convey that to you, the probably-highly-skeptical public. I could spend an endless amount of time messing around with this system and find every moment of it enjoyable, regardless of whether or not I produce any decent music, and I want to find some people to share that with.

Beyond track 1

Around 5:00 I jump to a second mic which is feeding MIDI (generated externally using MIDIguitar) into the program via the LoopBe internal MIDI cable, but I quickly abandon this in favor of loading up some buttons on a Guitar Hero guitar to produce MIDI (again, via Singing Stream). This is the instrument I'm using for the remainder of this demo on tracks 4 and 5.

You can see this competition for inclusion in the recording occurring in the same manner on those tracks as it did in track 1. Jumping back and forth between instruments is designed to be extremely easy with The Amanuensis, so you will notice that I'm not completely done with track 1 and wind up throwing down some more beatboxing here and there as I see fit.

Switching the sound that your instrument is playing is also meant to be very streamline. In this demo you can see that two different tracks are set up to play synths. Around 9:55 you will notice that the label denoting the Guitar Hero guitar as a MIDI source starts flipping around until it lands on track 4. This is me using a hotkey to move that source to match it up with whatever recording source I choose. The + and - keys will do this for you, but I actually have a DDR dance pad off to the side for me to stomp on set up to handle this (more on this in future blogs).

The resulting recording

This is by no means a finished product, but I like where it's heading, so I think I'll continue working on it in subsequent blogs. With The Amanuensis past projects can be recalled and loaded in the exact state you left them in. So with that, I think I will say…

Until next time, farewell and may your vessel reach the singularity intact,

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https://tothesun.bandcamp.com/
https://soundcloud.com/to_the_sun
https://sellfy.com/to_the_sun

Series Backlinks

Blog #1 - Introducing The Amanuensis: Automated Songwriting and Recording