Wow, this is probably the most intuitively enjoyable music tool I've ever used.
I'm not a musician and I know very little about what makes music good, but playing with this tool felt like I was hearing a better version of my own imagination. Like those scenes in movies where people can suddenly play music and have no idea how they're doing it.
By total chance, this revealed a flaw with my mouse that's been haunting me for months.
My right mouse button intermittently doesn't bring up context menus, which I seemingly confirmed by recording the screen and visualizing click events in a presentation mode. It would show what looked like one right click, but no context menu, or a context menu that appeared and was immediately dismissed.
But this revealed that it's actually rapidly sending multiple logical clicks per physical click. The logical clicks are fast enough that the screen recordings didn't differentiate them as separate events - which sent me in the wrong direction, making me think the OS was disregarding clicks. But here, the multiple clicks are clearly audible.
So thanks!
As a person with no knowledge of music theory, I am amazed how the music produced here, even with completely random mouse movements, still sounds decent—even a bit pleasing, if I may. Certainly better than hitting keys randomly on a piano as an amateur. How does that happen? Is it just about the tempo, and how space between two notes has been programmatically defined?
Nice! One problem: There's digital clipping. I suspect that the four samples are normalized individually, and when playing at the same time the transients add up to over 0dB. On quality headphones (beyerdynamic dt770 for me) it is quite audible. It happens with the piano and the synth sample, but is more audible with the piano sample.
Implementation of something like this in Pong would be brilliant, where the ball is the "mouse"
With the default settings and just scrolling around it really feels like I'm in some sort of badly played Ghibli's OST!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpfLKbjTWn0
As the world's most Curmudgeonly and Grumpy Old Man (TM) when it comes to web-based music applications ... THIS IS AMAZING. If I wasn't busy, I'd be implementing a native version of this right now. I know some of Laurie Spiegel's music, but had no idea she had ever designed anything like this. Just amazing.
No matter where I move my cursor, it ends up sounding like an opening theme for a light-hearted anime series. Impressed at how melodic it sounds even though I don't know what I'm doing.
Also please fix the mouse jacking. I was only able to regain control of my mouse after exiting the tab :(
I played with the original a long time ago. IIRC, back then Laurie Spiegel asked for some kind of credit on music that was generated by it given that the musical output would be bounded by the software design.
Also, if you've never heard her album Unseen Worlds, its definitly worth checking out.
how fun.
maybe the author does not know this, but shift+/ doesn't work on a portuguese keyboard at least in safari; shift-7 is / and shift-' is ?
all of the other keys work.
I had low expectations for this when I clicked the link and saw the spinny-rotatey loading ring (which for informational sites usually portends a wasted journey) - but I have to say this is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time! I think an FPGA-based implementation of this or something similar might end up on my projects list in the not too distant future...
Nice! That guy also made this interactive version of Terry Riley's "In C": https://teropa.info/in-c/
It does produce quite nice-sounding fragments from random mouse moves. It highlights how much of the actual music composition process is just plain math, which is done by the algorithm in this case.
With your hand on the mouse, move it up and down a couple millimetres quickly, like you're scratching an itch. This makes quite a nice song.
Wow, it's like a Keith Jarrett improv generator!
Is there a way to move the mouse without playing a key? I am using a touchpad, so maybe it can't be done without an actual mouse.
Nice! I expect to see more applications like this with the introduction of Max's RNBO library a few weeks back.
I had this software when I was a kid on my Macintosh Classic.
This brought back a lot of fond memories -- just doodling with sound.
Thanks!
Always love to see Tero Parviainen's new projects. Big inspiration for my webaudio tinkering.
Incredible - loved it! This is what a modern digital music instrument should be like :)
god I clicked in and suddenly an hour went by, this is brilliant
Cool! It's kind of a glorified wind chime.
Ingenious! Can I record in the app?
How are the tones generated?
Is the source code available somewhere?
It's a modern Web Audio implementation of this Mac software from 1986 (last updated in 2004).
Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629172536fw_/http://retiary... (Archived because the original site is quite slow: http://retiary.org/ls/programs.html)
It was written by Laurie Spiegel, a composer and early pioneer in electronic music.
> Music Mouse is an algorithmic musical composition software developed by Laurie Spiegel. The "intelligent instrument" name refers to the program's built-in knowledge of chord and scale convention and stylistic constraints. Automating these processes allows the user to focus on other aspects of the music in real time.
> In addition to improvisations using this software, Spiegel composed several works for "Music Mouse", including Cavis muris in 1986, Three Sonic Spaces in 1989, and Sound Zones in 1990. She continued to update the program through Macintosh OS 9 and, as of 2021, it remained available for purchase or demo download from her website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Spiegel
She was featured in the documentary, Sisters with Transistors. https://sisterswithtransistors.com/