Just another nerd.
YouTuber Broccaloo has been posting these fascinating videos where Jukebox AI is primed with the first 25 percent of a song, and then the AI completes the rest.
Broccaloo has a nice instructional video about how he uses Jukebox AI running on Google Colab to create these.
The Hurrian songs are a collection of music inscribed in cuneiform on clay tablets excavated from the ancient Amorite -Canaanite city of Ugarit, a headland in northern Syria, which date to approximately 1400 BCE. One of these tablets, which is nearly complete, contains the Hurrian hymn to Nikkal (also known as the Hurrian cult hymn or A Zaluzi to the Gods, or simply h.6), making it the oldest surviving substantially complete work of notated music in the world. While the composers’ names of some of the fragmentary pieces are known, h.6 is an anonymous work.
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The tablet h.6 contains the lyrics for a hymn to Nikkal, a Semitic goddess of orchards, and instructions for a singer accompanied by a nine-stringed sammûm, a type of harp or, much more likely, a lyre. One or more of the tablets also contains instructions for tuning the harp.
There are several versions of the music on YouTube based on different transcriptions.
Nice video from the Foundation for Economic Education recounting the tale of the Parent’s Music Resource Center.
I’d forgotten about the Filthy Fifteen list of songs that the PMRC put out in 1985 as being most objectionable.
C-SPAN has a video of the nearly 5-hour long testimony on September 19, 1985 before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. A full transcript plus additional materials is available here.
Wu-Craft is a Mega Ran-produced album by Phill Harmonix that narrates the story of World of Warcraft over Wu-Tang beats. Highly recommended.
I had been waiting for Stardew Valley’s release for several months now, and when I finally played the game I was especially impressed with how good the music was. So impressed, that I paid $4.99 to purchase the Stardew Valley Soundtrack on Steam.
Okay, so I purchased the music, but how do I actually listen to it?
Well, first I tried clicking “Play” on the screen above, but that simply launched the game itself.
Hmmm. So then I remembered that there was “Music” option in the Steam Library. So I head over there, but there’s no Music in my Steam library at all.
So I clicked on the Music Library settings option, but that screen left me scratching my head. Since Steam didn’t give me any indication of where it might have put the music (and it isn’t showing up in my library), I’m not sure what I need to do here.
After a Google search, it turns out that Steam “helpfully” puts music in a subdirectory under the main game installation directory. So, if a game like Stardew Valley is installed here:
/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Stardew Valley/
then the soundtrack is located here:
/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Stardew Valley/StardewValleyOST/
Eventually my Steam client restarted for an update and it automatically added the soundtrack when scanning at startup. Apparently if I had clicked the “Scan Now” button, that would have likely added it to my library.
This. Is. Stupid.
I buy almost all of my video games through Steam because it is so easy to use and works well at keeping everything organized. My experience buying music from Steam, however, was a visit to frustration-ville.
The product page for the soundtrack should at a minimum include a clickable link that will open up the directory where the music is stored on the local machine, and I cannot for the life of me understand why Steam doesn’t automatically add any music I’ve purchased and installed from Steam onto the music list automatically. I shouldn’t have to restart my client or click through configuration screens to find a button to rescan my music collection.
Glitch Sequencer is a MIDI sequencer that generates experimental music from cellular automata (think Conway’s Game of Life and similar systems).