On Sat, 2006-05-13 at 00:09 +0900, Shane Emmons wrote:
> This is really cool. Now what would be even cooler is if someone could 
> modify their Markov Chain program to read tabs and generate new songs to 
> be played.
> 

You read my mind :) Actually, the idea for this quiz grew out of my
playing around with exactly that. I never ended up taking it anywhere,
mainly because it got pretty difficult to make it differentiate between
different styles of play, tempo, key, etc. Just doing the Markov thing
it's pretty difficult to get anything but noise - I guess by very
carefully controlling the inputs to contain only a specific type of
music (e.g. just solos, just strummed progressions, etc.,) some
reasonably coherent sounds could be obtained, but then of course you'd
get the same problems as with the regular Markov chains and limited
bodies of input.

I still think it's possible to come up with halfway decent results using
that technique, but I think you'd have to step back from the notes and
chords, and instead look for similar phrases - Markov with a high order
value - and maybe give it the ability to transpose a phrase to fit, but
I still don't know if you'd find enough scope to do anything except
regenerate one of the inputs, or get stuck in a loop.

There are some fairly cool things you can do to this end, though:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-generated_music

It would certainly be very cool to see all this brought together in
Ruby :)

-- 
Ross Bamford - rosco / roscopeco.REMOVE.co.uk