Systems music is an idea that explores the following question: What if we could, instead of making music, design systems that generate music for us?

This idea has animated artists and composers for a long time and emerges in new forms whenever new technologies are adopted in music-making.

In the 1960s and 70s there was a particularly fruitful period. People like Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, and Brian Eno designed systems that resulted in many landmark works of minimal and ambient music. They worked with the cutting edge technologies of the time: Magnetic tape recorders, loops, and delays.

Today our technological opportunities for making systems music are broader than ever. Thanks to computers and software, they're virtually endless. But to me, there is one platform that's particularly exciting from this perspective: Web Audio. Here we have a technology that combines audio synthesis and processing capabilities with a general purpose programming language: JavaScript. It is a platform that's available everywhere — or at least we're getting there. If we make a musical system for Web Audio, any computer or smartphone in the world can run it.

With Web Audio we can do something Reich, Riley, Oliveros, and Eno could not do all those decades ago: They could only share some of the output of their systems by recording them. We can share the system itself. Thanks to the unique power of the web platform, all we need to do is send a URL.

In this guide we'll explore some of the history of systems music and the possibilities of making musical systems with Web Audio and JavaScript. We'll pay homage to three seminal systems pieces by examining and attempting to recreate them: "It's Gonna Rain" by Steve Reich, "Discreet Music" by Brian Eno, and "Ambient 1: Music for Airports", also by Brian Eno.

Table of Contents

"Is This for Me?"
How to Read This Guide
The Tools You'll Need
Steve Reich - It's Gonna Rain (1965)
    Setting Up itsgonnarain.js
    Loading A Sound File
    Playing The Sound
    Looping The Sound
    How Phase Music Works
    Setting up The Second Loop
    Adding Stereo Panning
    Putting It Together: Adding Phase Shifting
    Exploring Variations on It's Gonna Rain
Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports, 2/1 (1978)
    The Notes and Intervals in Music for Airports
    Setting up musicforairports.js
    Obtaining Samples to Play
    Building a Simple Sampler
    A System of Loops
    Playing Extended Loops
    Adding Reverb
    Putting It Together: Launching the Loops
    Exploring Variations on Music for Airports
Brian Eno - Discreet Music (1975)
    Setting up discreetmusic.js
    Synthesizing the Sound Inputs
        Setting up a Monophonic Synth with a Sawtooth Wave
        Filtering the Wave
        Tweaking the Amplitude Envelope
        Bringing in a Second Oscillator
        Emulating Tape Wow with Vibrato
    Understanding Timing in Tone.js
        Transport Time
        Musical Timing
    Sequencing the Synth Loops
    Adding Echo
    Adding Tape Delay with Frippertronics
    Controlling Timbre with a Graphic Equalizer
        Setting up the Equalizer Filters
        Building the Equalizer Control UI
Going Forward

Welcome to Lospec, a home for digitally restrictive art. We create online tools for people creating pixel art and other restrictive digital art.

Digitally Restrictive Art

In the early days of computers, memory and storage space were a valuable commodity. Old hardware had very little space, every possible bit had to be conserved. Screen resolutions were small, and could only display a limited amount of colors. Music was stored as a sequence of notes rather than a single audio file. Games and programs had a maximum amount of space they could use, and they had to work within that restriction. Games made for the Atari 2600 could only be 32 kilobytes in total, including graphics, sounds, programming, levels.

Some people might view these restrictions as inconvenient, something that can only hinder your creative process. But there are many benefits to creating art within restrictions. Sometimes they simply help your get over art blocks by giving you a place to start, or help you use a consistent style throughout a piece. They can also force you to think in ways you might not have before and find creative ways to represent your vision. Your goal changes from "how can I best depict this subject" to "how can I best depict this subject within these limitations". You start thinking about the design, and level of detail. You are forced to simplify and prioritize, and consider the piece as a whole. It changes the whole creative process and forces you to think about your art from a new angle. The process of creating pixel art is completely different from even similar art forms like digital painting.

Some artists may impose restrictions upon themselves purposefully just to take advantage of these benefits. Some restrictions are just a result of that art form, like the canvas size of a painting or material of a sculpture. In Digitally Restrictive Art, the restrictions are brought on by the fact that they are stored digitally and is usually based on how the data is saved.
Pixel Art - The most popular digitally restrictive art form, as it was the only option for graphics on early video game systems. Though it's not required any longer, many games today still utilize pixel art due to it's aesthetic appeal, simplicity, and relative ease of creation. A large community of artists and fans still exists around the net.

Voxel Art - A more recent creation which is essentially a 3D version of pixel art. Instead of being made up of squares, it is made up of cubes. It's visuall similarity to pixel art makes it look like something out of the early computing days, but in reality only recently have computers been able to handle voxels.

Ascii Art - Similar to pixel art, but instead of being made up of pixels, everything is made up of ASCII characters, like letters and numbers. Before computers could even display pictures, artists could create images out of text. It was mostly notably adopted by the hacking community for use in text files.

Low-poly 3D - 3D models are typically made up of thousands of polygons, connected at their edges to create 3D shapes. In modern movies and games there are typically so many polygons that you can't see them and they look like a smooth surface. But in the early days of 3d, artists were limited to very few polygons. Low-poly models are still occasionally used in games today for memory restrictions as well as aesthetics. A subset of low-poly 3D includes using pixel art for the textures, adding another layer of restrictions.

Chiptune - Storing audio digitally actually takes quite a bit of space. Rather than reducing the length or quality of a song, early digital composers created a way to store songs as notes, which are then played at specified times, essentially being performed live by the computer. There are many different formats of digitally restrictive music that offer a whole array of different features and sounds. Midi files for example have a preset group of instruments you can assign to each note, and MOD/XM files let you create your own instruments out of waveforms.

http://tesla1.teslafm.net:8000/tesla1 (copy-paste in VLC)

Schedule : https://tesla1.teslafm.net

A radio on-line just for culturally restless people who looks for non-commercial music, experimentation and counterculture information. From experimental electronic to electroacoustic and sound art; from improvisation to jazz and classical music; from old tunes from 19th century to current compositions; from 80s obscure artefacts to inspired sounds from this decade; cultural archives…, an eclectic journey.

The Silence Secret Society.

Other radios :

Radio tv-syd-dk : http://libretime.tv-syd.dk:8000/stream
Radio Inutile : http://51.254.203.56:8000/mp3_320
Radio Meuh : http://radiomeuh.ice.infomaniak.ch:8000/radiomeuh-128.mp3
Fip Autour du Jazz : http://chai5she.cdn.dvmr.fr/fip-webradio2.mp3
Radio Paradise : http://stream-dc1.radioparadise.com/aac-320
Zen radio : http://zen.radio.mynoise.net/
Nature radio : http://nature.radio.mynoise.net/
Space radio : http://space.radio.mynoise.net/

Le Paradoxe du Temps – Arman, 1961

Pixel-art scaling algorithms are graphical filters that are often used in video game emulators to enhance hand-drawn 2D pixel art graphics. The re-scaling of pixel art is a specialist sub-field of image rescaling.

As pixel-art graphics are usually in very low resolutions, they rely on careful placing of individual pixels, often with a limited palette of colors. This results in graphics that rely on a high amount of stylized visual cues to define complex shapes with very little resolution, down to individual pixels. This makes image scaling of pixel art a particularly difficult problem.

A number of specialized algorithms[1] have been developed to handle pixel-art graphics, as the traditional scaling algorithms do not take such perceptual cues into account.

Since a typical application of this technology is improving the appearance of fourth-generation and earlier video games on arcade and console emulators, many are designed to run in real time for sufficiently small input images at 60 frames per second. This places constraints on the type of programming techniques that can be used for this sort of real-time processing. Many work only on specific scale factors: 2× is the most common, with 3×, 4×, 5× and 6× also present.

Plugin for GIMP : https://github.com/bbbbbr/gimp-plugin-pixel-art-scalers

Waifu2x

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waifu2x
https://github.com/lltcggie/waifu2x-caffe/releases
https://github.com/imPRAGMA/W2XKit
https://old.reddit.com/r/WaifuUpscales/new/
https://github.com/BlueCocoa/waifu2x-ncnn-vulkan-macos/releases
https://old.reddit.com/r/Dandere2x/
https://old.reddit.com/r/waifu2x
https://github.com/AaronFeng753/Waifu2x-Extension
https://github.com/K4YT3X/video2x
https://old.reddit.com/r/AnimeResearch

Quote from a reddit comment :

A short list, ordered after output quality and setup time:

SRGAN, Super-resolution generative adversarial network : https://github.com/topics/srgan,
Other implementations: https://github.com/tensorlayer/srgan
https://github.com/brade31919/SRGAN-tensorflow
https://github.com/titu1994/Super-Resolution-using-Generative-Adversarial-Networks
Neural Enhance: https://github.com/alexjc/neural-enhance/

Photoshop: The newest PS version (19.x, since October 2017 release) also has a new upscaling method, called "Preserve Details 2.0 Upscale" but compared to SRGAN the results clearly lack sharp and fine details. You have asked for an App and PS is easy to use and can be automated.

Overview of the most popular algorithms:

https://github.com/IvoryCandy/super-resolution
(VDSR, EDSR, DCRN, SubPixelCNN, SRCNN, FSRCNN, SRGAN)

Not in the list above:

LapSRN: https://github.com/phoenix104104/LapSRN
SelfExSR: https://github.com/jbhuang0604/SelfExSR
RAISR, developed by Google:
https://github.com/MKFMIKU/RAISR
https://github.com/movehand/raisr

Cryptovoxels is a user owned virtual world that is powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Users can buy land and build virtual stores, art galleries, music studios or anything else you can imagine. The editing tools are built into the world, and multiuser voice chat lets you spend time with friends exploring the city.

NASA publishes many Earth datasets at monthly time scales, and this GIF uses one frame per month to show the fluctuating seasons. The animation focuses mainly on data about Arctic sea ice and vegetation, but it was hard to choose - NASA has many other beautiful seasonal datasets, like fire, temperature, or rainfall.

Demonstration tutorial of retraining OpenAI’s GPT-2-small (a text-generating Transformer neural network) on a large public domain Project Gutenberg poetry corpus to generate high-quality English verse.

https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-gpt2/

Other tutorial : https://medium.com/@ngwaifoong92/beginners-guide-to-retrain-gpt-2-117m-to-generate-custom-text-content-8bb5363d8b7f
https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple

Example : http://textsynth.org/

Datasets :
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets
https://github.com/awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets

Scrap webpage with python :
https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
https://github.com/EugenHotaj/beatles/blob/master/scraper.py

This site tries to gather open-source remakes of great old games in one place. If you think that something is missing from the list - please go to our GitHub repository and create an issue or even a pull request!

Since all these projects are open-source you can help them and make this world a better place. Or at least you can play something to appreciate the effort people put in them.

A free and open-source intermedia sequencer

Enables precise and flexible scripting of interactive scenarios.
Control and score any OSC-compliant software or hardware:
Max/MSP, PureData, openFrameworks, Processing…

Mosaic is an open source multi-platform (osx, linux, windows) live coding and visual programming application, based on openFrameworks.

This project deals with the idea of integrate/amplify human-machine communication, offering a real-time flowchart based visual interface for high level creative coding. As live-coding scripting languages offer a high level coding environment, ofxVisualProgramming and the Mosaic Project as his parent layer container, aim at a high level visual-programming environment, with embedded multi scripting languages availability (Lua, GLSL, Python and BASH(macOS & linux) ).

As this project is based on openFrameworks, one of the goals is to offer as more objects as possible, using the pre-defined OF classes for trans-media manipulation (audio, text, image, video, electronics, computer vision), plus all the gigantic ofxaddons ecosystem actually available (machine learning, protocols, web, hardware interface, among a lot more).

While the described characteristics could potentially offer an extremely high complex result (OF and OFXADDONS ecosystem is really huge, and the possibility of multiple scripting languages could lead every unexperienced user to confusion), the idea behind the interface design aim at avoiding the "high complex" situation, embodying a direct and natural drag&drop connect/disconnet interface (mouse/trackpad) on the most basic level of interaction, adding text editing (keyboard) on a intermediate level of interaction (script editing), following most advanced level of interaction for experienced users (external devices communication, automated interaction, etc...)

While the future can never be predicted with absolute certainty, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of some far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. These fields include astrophysics, which has revealed how planets and stars form, interact, and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales; evolutionary biology, which predicts how life will evolve over time; and plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia.

All projections of the future of the Earth, the Solar System, and the universe must account for the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, or a loss of the energy available to do work, must rise over time. Stars will eventually exhaust their supply of hydrogen fuel and burn out. Close encounters between astronomical objects gravitationally fling planets from their star systems, and star systems from galaxies.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronologie_du_futur_lointain

Welcome to Planet eBook, the home of free classic literature! The latest version of the site, with its mobile-friendly design and multi-format eBooks, attempts to make our collection of eBooks available on all devices.

Existing free eBooks on the web tend to be well beneath the quality of paper books, making them more difficult and less pleasurable to read. In a small way, we’re trying to change this. Our goal is to publish a small selection of high-quality eBooks — each a genuine alternative for readers wanting to enjoy reading a book without having to pay for it.

The books we publish in Australia are all in the public domain and out of copyright. Please be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading.

Richard

Beats is a command-line drum machine. Feed it a song notated in YAML, and it will produce a precision-milled Wave file of impeccable timing and feel.

http://beatsdrummachine.com/tutorial/
http://tropone.de/2019/02/21/ungewoehnliche-wege-rhythmen-zu-programmieren-teil-2-beats-cl/

Each letter of the alphabet is an operation, lowercase letters operate on bang, uppercase letters operate each frame. Orca is designed to control other applications, create procedural sequencers, and to experiment with livecoding. See the documentation and installation instructions here, or have a look at a tutorial video.

Operators

• A add: Outputs the sum of inputs.
• B bool: Bangs if input is not empty, or 0.
• C clock: Outputs a constant value based on the runtime frame.
• D delay: Bangs on a fraction of the runtime frame.
• E east: Moves eastward, or bangs.
• F if: Bangs if both inputs are equal.
• G generator: Writes distant operators with offset.
• H halt: Stops southward operators from operating.
• I increment: Increments southward operator.
• J jumper: Outputs the northward operator.
• K konkat: Outputs multiple variables.
• L loop: Loops a number of eastward operators.
• M modulo: Outputs the modulo of input.
• N north: Moves Northward, or bangs.
• O offset: Reads a distant operator with offset.
• P push: Writes an eastward operator with offset.
• Q query: Reads distant operators with offset.
• R random: Outputs a random value.
• S south: Moves southward, or bangs.
• T track: Reads an eastward operator with offset.
• U uturn: Reverses movement of inputs.
• V variable: Reads and write globally available variables.
• W west: Moves westward, or bangs.
• X teleport: Writes a distant operator with offset.
• Y jymper: Outputs the westward operator.
• Z zoom: Moves eastwardly, respawns west on collision.
• * bang: Bangs neighboring operators.
• # comment: Comments a line, or characters until the next hash.
• : midi: Sends a MIDI note.
• ^ cc: Sends a MIDI CC value.
• ; udp: Sends a UDP message.
• = osc: Sends a OSC message.

Controls

Terminal Controls

• enter bang selected operator.
• shift+enter toggle insert/write.
• space toggle play/pause.
• > increase BPM.
• < decrease BPM.
• shift+arrowKey Expand cursor.
• ctrl+arrowKey Leap cursor.
• alt+arrowKey Move selection.

Edit

• ctrl+c copy selection.
• ctrl+x cut selection.
• ctrl+v paste selection.
• ctrl+z undo.
• ctrl+shift+z redo.

Grid Controls

• ] increase grid size vertically.
• [ decrease grid size vertically.
• } increase grid size horizontally.
• { decrease grid size horizontally.
• ctrl/meta+] increase program size vertically.
• ctrl/meta+[ decrease program size vertically.
• ctrl/meta+} increase program size horizontally.
• ctrl/meta+{ decrease program size horizontally.

Window

• ctrl+= Zoom In.
• ctrl+- Zoom Out.
• ctrl+0 Zoom Reset.
• tab Toggle interface.
• backquote Toggle background.

Download the app here : https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/orca
Source code : https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Orca
Video tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaI_TuISSJE

To test midi on Macosx : http://notahat.com/simplesynth
Activate the virtual Midi input on Macosx : https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209774225-Using-virtual-MIDI-buses

Pilot (another way to create music with orca from the same creators) :

Download the app here : https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/pilot
Source code : https://github.com/hundredrabbits/Pilot

A good explanation of the software in German : http://tropone.de/2019/03/13/orca-ein-sequenzer-der-kryptischer-nicht-aussehen-kann-und-ein-versuch-einer-anleitung/

How does our understanding of technology change when abstractions become tangible? In this course, paper acts as a bridge between code, mathematics, and our human sensory experience of the world.

When we fold, we imbue an inert material with pattern, structure, animation, function, and interface; a crease in paper is a re-programming of the material’s memory. Folded structures give us a means to touch and manipulate difficult problems and unlike simple machines (limited by static friction), folding systems can be applied at any scale, from nanometer to spacecraft scale. With an increased knowledge of folding mechanisms can we build more sustainable, ecologically-aware technology?

Lead by paper engineer and designer Kelli Anderson and origami artist and developer Robby Kraft, SFPC’s two-week session will explore the wide variety of ways that a piece of paper can produce function.

You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.

Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.

Twine was originally created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and is now maintained by a whole bunch of people at several different repositories.

Naming is hard. Names, after all, are perhaps the most indelible artifacts of the product creation process. Brands are redesigned with a lustrum regularity and codebases are continually rewritten and replaced but a name, for better or worse, usually sticks.

That’s because a good name is a hook that sets itself into a person’s mind, linking their brain back to your idea – try to reset the hook and you risk losing the connection. The process of naming, then, is the process of neatly packaging up that idea, discovering where it begins and ends so it can be linked as a discrete, easily remembered concept.

A good name can help a company or product become successful, of course, but it can also help the lowliest code library find an audience, help formalize an informal process, and propel ideas about the world toward becoming talking points throughout it.

And yet, what tools do we use for naming? What methodology? Many of us practice it informally, doing our best with thesauruses and domain name searches, never stopping to formalize an approach because it seems so devilishly simple – all you really need is a word or two in a language you’ve probably been using your entire life.

But like any art form, naming benefits from rich tools and processes, and this site is meant to help you discover them – to provide a starting point for anyone who needs to name something. That is: everyone, because every idea benefits from a good name.

REXPaint is a powerful and user-friendly ASCII art editor. Use a wide variety of tools to create ANSI block/line art, roguelike mockups and maps, UI layouts, and for other game development needs. Originally an in-house dev tool used by Grid Sage Games for traditional roguelike development, this software has been made available to other developers and artists free of charge. While core functionality and tons of features already exist, occasional updates are known to happen.