The Amanuensis: Automated Songwriting and Recording will be appearing on the Spotlight on the Artist radio show this Friday

in #video-game6 years ago (edited)

Tune into MSP Waves on Fridays from 1 PM-3 PM (CST) for the Spotlight on the Artist show hosted by @D-VINE! Along with five other artists each speaking about their own work, this Friday I will be talking for 20 minutes about my automated songwriting and recording system, The Amanuensis. If you want to ask questions and contribute to the conversation, please listen on the discord server!

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.

Here are some sample songs that were arranged and recorded automatically by the system:

And one of my daily test runs if you want to see it in action:
https://dlive.io/video/to-the-sun/946a4544-8fb6-11e8-b4e3-0242ac110003

The Amanuensis is designed to be as versatile as possible, meaning just about anything you could imagine to play music with can be used as an instrument. Anything from MIDI based instruments like an electronic drum kit or keyboards, to traditional instruments like guitars and acoustic drums, beatboxing or singing and even more abstract sources like game controllers or by dancing in front of a Microsoft Kinect.

The system plays very much like a game. It's half recording software and half Guitar Hero. What it winds up recording is never quite what you would have chosen yourself, had you been sitting down and doing that long work of editing, but that's the point. It keeps you on your toes, which requires you to stay spontaneous and therefore creative. It joins in and starts playing with you, just like a fellow musician in a jam session. Your goal is to work together with it to create the best music you can in the moment, free from desires for any outcome in particular.

In fact I just created a post detailing the goals for giving The Amanuensis a more game-like user interface with real-time scoring, making it more fun and drawing in nonmusicians and casual players as well. To become more Guitar Hero-esque is only the beginning. I have a vision of a full-on videogame where the soundtrack and even the levels themselves are created by the player as they play (their controller moving their character on screen at the same time as it plays musical notes).

If you would like to try out the system, you are absolutely encouraged to do so! It's an open-source project, so it's continually in development, but there are a series of tutorials you can follow in getting set up:

NOTE: Despite what these tutorials say, the system should actually be cross-platform now.

In addition to that, if you know some Python or Max/MSP and would like to contribute to the code, that would be great too, and can be done through the Github repository!

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This post has been voted on from MSP3K courtesy of @isaria from the Minnow Support Project ( @minnowsupport ).

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