Archaeopteryx: ruby generating music

04.Jan.2009

I’m still digesting this, but it’s great resource to share. Being a music fan, anything that mixes music and programming catches my attention. If it’s programming in ruby, even better.

It’s a talk at Ruby Fringe given by Giles Bowkett. It’s about a lot of things, about ruby, its paradigms, startups’ industry, but the main theme is Archaeopteryx, an open source ruby MIDI generator. As it’s explained on the video, it generates music on the MIDI format based on probability matrices. All the theory makes it a bit more complex, but with a bit of practice, you can make the matrices generate some good techno music.

However, what got me the most was the possibilities given near the end of the talk. Since the is music computer generated and its source data can be changed in real-time, the music itself may be changed to adapt to any sort of input. The example given was people at a disco strumming at some instrument to emphasize the beat that they were liking the most. The strumming information was then processed and integrated with the music generation matrices.

With a little imagination, great projects can derive from this concept. I imagine for example, an ambient sound computer adjusting to the mood it senses around the room, through movement detection cameras or small microphones. There are many possibilities indeed and I still have to research more on this topic.

If you like to try out Archaeopteryx check its repository for more information. The following short video shows a bit more of the library in action:


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