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Music Media Technology

New Directions In Music Tech At Siggraph 137

Posted by timothy from the good-sounds-sound-good dept.
Cyrrin writes "The 2003 Siggraph conference is under way in San Diego, and the Emerging Technologies booth is showcasing several noteworthy projects in the field of human-computer interaction in music production. First, The Continuator system, from Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris which learns in real-time the style of a performing pianist, taking into account chord structures, rhythm, and melody, and then renders a musical performance in a similar style. Next is The Augmented Composer Project which uses real-time image processing to read the arrangement and orientation of symbolic cards on a table to allow a composer to assemble components of a musical phrase. Finally, those wizards at the MIT Media Lab bring you Hyperscore, a visual composition program which is intended for childen to be able to easily create complex and fantastic music sequences. (And it's fun for adults too!) Hyperscore is part of the Toy Symphony project and is available for download by going to the Musictoys->Hyperscore-> Showcase page (Windows-only though)."
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New Directions In Music Tech At Siggraph More

New Directions In Music Tech At Siggraph

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  • A musicians worse nightmare. (Score:3, Flamebait)

    by HanzoSan ( 251665 ) * on Monday July 28, 2003 @05:20PM (#6554267) Homepage Journal
    I see, so I guess because Sony cant sell CDs anymore now they want to make machines which learn from successful musicians and generate music I guess so they can fire the musician and sell the new machine product to consumers.

    I guess musicians should prepare to be replaced by the machines.
    • Oh, for a moment there I thought you were gonna say "humans should prepare to be replaced by machines"

      Thank God that is not the case...

    • Re: A musicians worse nightmare. (Score:4, Funny)

      by chill ( 34294 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @05:23PM (#6554294) Journal
      I see, so I guess because Sony cant sell CDs anymore now they want to make machines which learn from successful musicians and generate music I guess so they can fire the musician and sell the new machine product to consumers.

      With luck, it's first exposure will be to Boy George, Britney Spears and William Shatner. If it is truly smart software, it will then kill itself and try it's damndest to take as many music execs as possible with it.

    • Old news... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 )
      "I guess musicians should prepare to be replaced by the machines."

      They've been doing that for years already. Haven't you been listening to any of today's hit songs?
      • "They've been doing that for years already. Haven't you been listening to any of today's hit songs?"

        Yeah, but why would any real musician want to waste his/her talent on the Backstreet Boys anyway?

    • There was a star trek voyager episode that dealt with this, where a society that had never heard music before was amazed by the Doctors singing ability. At the end they designed another hologram that was superior to the Doctor's singing ability, however it lacked any feeling or emotion. Thought, feelings, and much more goes in to music, until they perfect that chess program... we don't have to worry about computers taking over the airwaves yet.

      • For me its not thought/feeling, or the lyrics, its the arrangement and composing.
        • the arrangement and composing is the thought/feeling. Or at least the thought, anyway. I don't believe that someone could have a perfect arrangement without any thought whatsoever. The feeling is important, though. Unless you're going for cold and dead, the music you make will have some emotion showing. Of course, if you go for emotionless, that's almost an emotion too.
  • To anyone whose there:
    Is there any good (*nix-based) competitors to iTunes? Any talk of the evil p2p??

    --Bryan
    • Maybe I'm out of it, but I use imacs at work and have a little experience with itunes there. I don't see what the big deal is. It plays mp3s yippee! Am I missing something?
      • the online store dealy that's like napster only you pay 99 cents per download. It's not free like napster but at least the song you download is the right song, and you don't have to wonder "hey creedence clearwater wrote hotel california? weird, and why does it sound like zepplin's black dog?"

        --Bryan
    • If you want good music library management, you could try Yammi [sourceforge.net]

      It uses xmms to play the MP3's, but provides you with some of the library management stuff that XMMS fails at. i.e. If you have your whole music collection on your machine, you want a good way to browse it.

  • ...the electronic musician Paul Lansky [princeton.edu] already did this on his album Ride [princeton.edu] with a 14 minute piece entitled "Heavy Set". It's quite repetitive, though; it's literally just a piano with occasional ambience-esque swathes of melody every few moments. You can hear an excerpt of it [princeton.edu].

  • I wonder what would happen... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...if that MIT punk from a couple of articles back pointed his scanner at that windows-only monstrosity.

  • As seen on TV (Score:2, Informative)

    by seekohler ( 264712 )
    They did a bit on Hyperscore (and the Toy Symphony) on an episode of Scientific American Frontiers a few months back.

    http://www.pbs.org/saf/1309/index.html
  • Moreso really by the notion that people can create ideas. When we realize that ideas exist outside of time, and get rid of these dumb laws, we can truly discover music. But it'll happen.

  • audiopad (Score:4, Interesting)

    by edrugtrader ( 442064 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @05:25PM (#6554308) Homepage
    what about audiopad [mit.edu]??

    that is the sickest thing i've ever seen.
    • I certainly find audiopad [mit.edu] much more interesting than these three. Be sure to watch the audiopad video, which illustrates its impressive projector_integrated interface. Definately the coolest electronic performance tool I've seen.

  • The Continuator (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @05:28PM (#6554319)
    > The Continuator system, from Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris which
    > learns in real-time the style of a performing pianist, taking into account
    > chord structures, rhythm, and melody, and then renders a musical performance in
    > a similar style.

    The Continuator, the latest product from Sony Computer Science Laboratory (a wholly-owned subsidiary of CyberDyne Heavy Industries, Inc.), was quoted as saying, "Say, that's a nice tune you've got there..." The demo's guest pianist was later found gruesomely slain in a back room of the exhibition hall.

  • What about creativity (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @05:32PM (#6554349)
    "The Continuator system [...] which learns in real-time the style of a performing pianist [...]"

    "[...] to allow a composer to assemble components of a musical phrase"

    "[...] Hyperscore, a visual composition program which is intended for childen to be able to easily create complex and fantastic music sequences"
    So, with all those coming fantastic tools, and the ones we already have, how come the music market is flooded with inane Britney Spear-ish crap, bad techno and shitty teenage bands?

    I'm not a great fan of rock-whatever, but I notice a great portion of radio air-time is filled with oldies, and also new releases, from long-established bands that happen to play actual instruments with (supposedly) their talent and hard work as primary source of arrangements, musical phrases and fantastic music sequences. Maybe old-timer know something newer "artists" don't ...

    Shouldn't the so-called "artists" learn to read and write scores first, lean to play an instrument, then work and work at their art to get better before using all the gimmicks? A gold-plated turd is still a turd, and I have the distinct feeling that many mediocre artists think electronic gadgetry will make them better, when really the gadgetry only does its best to presents the bad music better in the end.
    • I take issue with you idea that artists should learn to read music first.

      Alot of traditional music, i.e. folk, blues, etc was made by people who probably could not read let alone read music.

      In addition, music in its current written form is not necessarily the best way to represent music. Just as there are a number of alphabets, and or different ways to use them, (pencil, typewriter, computer) the computer allows different ways to explore and create.
      • "Birds don't read music." -Charlie Parker
      • Yeah but try being a gigging professional musician these days and not know how to read? Forgetaboutit, ain't happening. They have to be literate in their language.

        >In addition, music in its current written form is not necessarily the best way to represent music. Just as there are a number of alphabets,

        Too bad the present music notation scheme is the only one we've got right now.

        Here's an idea: Why do you make up something new instead of complaining about the lack thereof.
        • "Yeah but try being a gigging professional musician these days and not know how to read? Forgetaboutit, ain't happening. They have to be literate in their language."

          If you look at the software, it is made for children and people interested in music, not for professional musicians.

          "Here's an idea: Why do you make up something new instead of complaining about the lack thereof"

          I am not complaining about the lack of a different system, just stating that there are many possible ways to create notation. Again,
    • entertainers (Boy bands, britney, etc...) with musicians.

      And don't confuse them with Rap artist, who are the modern day poets. really, its more like prose.
      Listen to EmmnEmm, he writes some very clever lyrics.

    • "how come the music market is flooded with inane Britney Spear-ish crap, bad techno and shitty teenage bands?"

      Beacuse that is what sells out at best buy and music city.
    • There's always going to be a rift between, say, Mozart and the Backstreet Boys. There's a fundamental difference between the two. The reason why classical music doesn't have the same appeal to the younger audience (in general) than "shitty teenage bands" is that classical music is too musical -- the complexity is too great for an untrained ear to really understand. On the other hand, that doesn't make new music bad.

      Take, for example, the Beatles (oldies, yes, but new compared to Bach). Not all of thei
      • You're not looking at this correctly. It's not 'musical training' as such--it's hard work. That's what is completely lacking with the boy bands and slut-of-the-month pop sensations; and that is what I suspect the original poster is really getting at. On the other hand, even people who can't read or write music, like Paul McCartney, can be fine composers. But it takes a lot of hard work and hard thought.

        Most people don't realize how much time and effort it takes to write or even play well. Mozart spent

        • Anyone can be George Harrison given the right tools and some time.

          Music is, indeed, hard work. Jimi Hendrix is a fantastic example - no musical training, but plenty of practice, and he's one of the greatest musicians ever. However, hard work doesn't necessarily make you a composer. Perhaps a song writer, but no composer. (Yes, there is a difference.)

          What makes all of the "great" composers so is that they never really needed to work anything out. Mozart could write entire compositions in days. A
          • However, hard work doesn't necessarily make you a composer.

            That's true. But I think the point still stands that the reason we're seeing so many transparent performers is that they aren't putting in a whole lot of thought. BTW, I wouldn't really make a distinction between a song writer and a composer, since they can both be reduced to rearranging already existing material. But that's a matter of how deeply you look at the words, really.

            What makes all of the "great" composers so is that they never really

            • But I think the point still stands that the reason we're seeing so many transparent performers is that they aren't putting in a whole lot of thought.

              I couldn't agree with you more. No matter how talented you may or may not be, if you don't put much real effort into your task, no matter what it may be, you aren't going to get superior results.

              But both Bach and Mozart put in a lot of hard work... Mozart did just as much work as Beethoven, he just did it in his head while playing billiards or taking a w
        • ...the complexity is too great for an untrained ear to really understand.

        The same can be said of any sort of music.

        No, sorry. At the time, classical music had just as many hacks cranking out crappy music in the classical style. Time has managed to weed out a great deal of the mediocre stuff, but you still have tons of bland, uninteresting stuff.

        Then, like today, true genius was ignored, and mediocrity was rewarded. The system was a bit different - there was a patronage of the rich, rather than a cont

      • "...classical music is too musical..."

        Probably one of the most facile explanations I've ever heard. Most young people listen to music to give them a sense of identity - art has nothing to do with it at all. Even the teenagers that do listen to classical music are usually doing it so they can identify themselves as smarter and more cultured than the average person.

        People who aren't music critics generally don't care one way or another about the artistic merit. If an artist is expressing something vaguely m

    • Re:What about creativity (Score:3, Informative)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )
      There's lots of creative music out there, it just doesn't get on the radio because it doesn't make Clear Channel money. The Jam scene is the best thing to happen to music since Pink Floyd. Check out some of the artists on the Live Music Archive or Furthurnet. The common thread is improvisation. They have to be talented to create new material every night.
    • Shouldn't the so-called "artists" learn to read and write scores first, lean to play an instrument, then work and work at their art to get better before using all the gimmicks?

      ... and I bet you want babies to learn the anatomy and physiology of their legs before they are allowed to walk. These are exploration tools so that the kids don't get so bogged down in the mechanics of reading and writing musical notation that they learn to hate music.

      The most effective way to get a high level of fluency in a f

      • OK, I play by ear rather frequently.

        I also read music. Maybe some people found it hard work - I never did. I've been reading music since I was 6-7 and can read it pretty much as fluently as English.

        Sure, you'll get some who can play superbly by ear alone. Jools Holland springs to mind. It makes it significantly harder to accurately replicate a complex performance, though, when you can merely replicate what you think you heard. When you have complex rhythms, chord structures and so on, even the best musici
        • "When you have complex rhythms, chord structures and so on, even the best musician is going to be hard pushed to pick it all up by hearing."

          My nephew plays his compositions on a MIDI keyboard hooked into his computer ... it converts the input into sheet music for him, and he can edit from there, have the computer play it back, add parts for other instruments, and print it out when he's happy with it. It doesn't make him a better musician, but he is more willing to compose and revise than someone who is u

          • I do pretty much the same, except that I've only just got the keyboard so I've not got the MIDI cable hooked up to the PC yet.

            Sheet music doesn't have to mean it was drawn out by hand, it just has to mean that it's written down using the most common notation for this sort of thing that's sufficiently verbose.
    • I agree, pop is (mostly) crap. The reason is that creative music, composed and performed flawlessly isn't as marketable to the teenage market, which is bursting with completely disposable income to be spent on CDs, concerts, etc. Just look at MTV, they started out bad enough, making the music video or the performer's navel/clothes/hummer as big or a bigger part of a songs success than the music. They've been driven to hardly even playing music videos by market pressure (read capitalist greed)

      The teenage
      • I've got to back up your praise of Frontline. It's excellent. At times it seems so incisive that I don't understand why other news agencies haven't picked up one of their stories and spun it to a wider audience. Check out "The Man Who Knew" [pbs.org]

  • New Artists (Score:4, Funny)

    by corgicorgi ( 692903 ) <corgi_fun@yah[ ]com ['oo.' in gap]> on Monday July 28, 2003 @05:33PM (#6554358) Homepage
    First, The Continuator system, from Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris which learns in real-time the style of a performing pianist, taking into account chord structures, rhythm, and melody, and then renders a musical performance in a similar style.

    That is so cool! I can't wait for an album release by Deep Blue!

  • Gibson MaGIC (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Lerxst Pratt ( 618277 )
    Gibson's MaGIC [gibsonmagic.com] was the last music innovation that gave me goosebumps. I wonder if they'll showcase this technology at the show. Imagine plugging ethernet cable into a Les Paul!!! Through this technology, they're making it easier for musicians to jam together online regardless of physical location. There's soooo much more to this technology, so check out the link for details.
    • Well, the speed of light is the limit there.

      Playing through ethernet, even perfectly done, will induce some latency. This latency can be very small (similar to the one existing when you play with someone in the same room), but would likely be bigger (we're talking in ms here, not seconds, but a lof of ms *are* noticeable) if the data has to transit through lots of little wires everywhere.

      This has to be taken into account if you plan to jam with someone located at thousands of km of you...
  • Finally, those wizards at the MIT Media Lab bring you Hyperscore, a visual composition program which is intended for childen to be able to easily create complex and fantastic music sequences.

    I have dabbled with Fruity Loops [fruityloops.com] for a while, but my greatest complaint, while trying to create/remix music has been it's immense complexity.

    True, it has an infinite number of features, and is supposed to be an all-in-one music studio, but as a novice at music, I found it extremely difficult to learn. I know it was

    • this is pretty OT here, but here goes:

      If you find FruityLoops overwhelmingly complex, never ever try Cubase or, worse yet, Logic Audio.

      I Find Fruityloops to be very easy to understand in fact, so it's what I use all the time. It's not quite professional grade just yet though, but it's getting there rapidly. I have yet to come up with an idea that I find myself unable to execute in fruityloops. Even crazy stuff like seamless fading between triplets and regular 4/4 can be done quite easily, and still it's m

  • Musicianship is still the key (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ratfynk ( 456467 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @05:52PM (#6554467) Journal
    Spontanious Human Composition (jazz) vs Non Human Spontanious. Wow what a pile of digital diarrhea. Even the great classical musicians of our time have the ability groove, something which computer generated stuff just does not do, and cannot. The recordings of Glen Gould are more akin to music paintings by great musician.
    It will be cute if they can imitate the humming of Glen Gould.

    There is no way that these guys will get the idea that the performance of music is still something that requires an interpretation. Something which you cannot quantify, and changes with each different performance of a great player. It depends on the players response to the current air pressure, sonic characteristics of a venue, temp of instrument, audience, the amount of rosin on bow at the time, the touch character of a certian piano. All the wonderfull things that the player has a skill to respond to. It especially depends on the ability of the performer to lead the audience and the wonderfull give and take that has been lost to recordings. Musicianship is not a product it is a real living breathing art that thank God cannot be programmed.

    • Yeah, a certain segment of geekdom is just jizzing at the thought of the "singularity" when computers rule. Robotic foosball and dancing partners anyone? Can't we get a middle ground between mainstream and geekstream?
    • I agree, both as a classically (among others) trained guitarist and as a programmer. To put it in terms more /.ers can understand: Glen Gould is a hacker--he just hacks a piano instead of a computer. There are virtuosos in both groups.

      That said, I can't wait for the day when computers can hack music. I mean, just from a novelty point of view, I'd like to be able to tell a program, "If Jimi Hendrix had been a classical guitarist, what would Dove Son Quei Fieri Occhi have sounded like?" and let the comput

    • Re:Musicianship is still the key (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I agree wholeheartedly that attempting to replicate the way a human being makes music, within the confines of a digital system, is at best an academic task; it will not, by and large,produce "beautiful music".

      However, there is a universe of sound (quite literally), that humans could not possibly create in the traditional way. This ranges from every 'natural sound' that occurs, to every conceivable way of shifting bits in a digital system. Your experience of this music (yes, I call it music, but lets not do
      • No certainly I would not. I am learning to compose for such things, my technique includes using mountain echo time delay calculated into fuge structure. My dream is to create a propane powered set of organ triggered horns, in combination with highly amplified real musicians at set distances. The microphone placements will be calculated to create diferent pieces of music at different spots. Even the audiance placement can be a part of the performance. I practice the pieces by using computer technology to tes
    • Frank Zappa (the man himself) said "anything can be music, but it doesn't become music until somebody wills it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music."

      As formidable a composer as Zappa was, Zappa used every tool at his disposal to will his compositions into reality, and he was a big proponent of electronic tools where appropriate. He loved that the Synclavier [obsolete.com] could allow him to finally hear his compositions without having to book an expensive orchestra to hear it.
    • Computers can't groove? Why not? Because of the "players [sic] response to current air pressure"? What does that mean anyway?

      Taken individually, the items in your list that actually make sense [sonic characteristics of the venue, instrument temperature, amount of rosin on bow, "touch character"] can quite easily be measured and fed back into an appropriate alogorithm, allowing a computer to respond to those things.

      The "audience" item is the one exception - it's very vague, but I guess you mean something l
      • Obviously you have never played an acoustic instrument. Calculating a great performers response to a melody is not something that is quantifiable. There are too many variables. Sure computers are good at generating a random response to a given situation but when you include all the possible variables involved in great music, no data base could hold all the possibilities. A great performer just grooves a response, this is the nature of an inborn musician. The computers calculated response will be too predict
    • I saw demos of continuator at CSL Paris and a concert of Bernard Lubat (excellent french jazzman/improviser) *and* Continuator (operated by its creator, Francois Pachet) at the IRCAM last year.

      The concert was very good, very similar to a dialog between like-minded musicians in fact. And the word dialog was carefully chosen here, as it was really a musical exchange between the human and the program. If people like Lubat (and other excellent jazzmen etc.) say that this application can create good music, I te

  • Swarms (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mostly Harmless ( 48610 ) <mike_pete&yahoo,com> on Monday July 28, 2003 @06:04PM (#6554535) Homepage
    The March 2003 issue of Discover Magazine [discover.com] had a good article on music and swarm behavior. [discover.com] If you think hyperscore, etc. is neat, check this out!

  • Starving Artists... (Score:3, Funny)

    by hcetSJ ( 672210 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @06:06PM (#6554557)
    Having been reduced to a roving band of minstrels, Metallica is now forced to compete with mechanical musicians which people have downloaded from the internet and printed in 3D [slashdot.org].
  • Who would own the copyright to such a composition?
  • Remember that Jewel chick who sung folksy songs and lived in a van in Alaska? When did she become YABC(yet another brittney clone) singing pop music and dressing like a tramp?
    • of why the industry is bad for music. Here's a very fine artist who signed to a label and then STOPPED PRODUCING - for more than a year while her label released every single track from her CD as a single/music video/marketing opportunity. This is an increasingly common trend in the business - produce every track as a single to get the CD back on the charts again and again - and in jewel's case it had the effect of making a talented and refreshing act into a burned out laughing stock. (Remember the SNL skit
  • Why was Sony demo'ing this at SIGGRAPH? SIGGRAPH is supposed to be all about graphics (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics or something like that).

    So, while this is cool, why would a music oriented product be shown at a computer graphics oriented exhibition?
    • SIGGRAPH is supposed to be all about graphics (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics or something like that).

      Ya, it's mostly about graphics, but technically they bill it as "The World's Largest Marketplace of Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques" (quoted from the conference webpage). So, I'm guessing this fits under "interactive techniques".

      I also found this brief overview [siggraph.org] on the conference website for those that are interested.

      • Regardless of what it gets billed as this year, the whole point of SIGGRAPH has always been computer graphics.

        So, why Sony thought showcasing a music product there, and why the organisers allowed it, is beyond me.
        • so if there is suddenly audio or interactivity, the graphics portion is irrelevant?

          the SIGs aren't so inherently narrow. as computers become multimedia platforms, they encompass all senses.

          furthermore, graphics/visualization and interface are inherently bound. you may be making music, but to use a GUI to make that music, there is a visual organization that is necessary, and that is very graphical by definition.

          it's better to have one conference to get all the right people in one place than to have 3 co
  • I tried out Hyperscore and was impressed by the very clean GUI.

    I deal with so many ugly/cluttered interfaces at work, this is like a breath of fresh air.

    Take a look at the tutorial to see the screenshots. The use of colors, shapes, textures, and sizes give feedback that is very intuitive.

    To reply to KewlPC's question as to why this stuff should be at Siggraph - Hyperscore is all about intelligent use of graphics.

    Kudos

  • Will MC Hawking [mchawking.com] be present?
  • Can we start to refer to things as, works under wine/doesnt work under wine? What is this need windows thing, its winter here, brrrr.

  • Toy Symphony (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PurpleBob ( 63566 ) on Monday July 28, 2003 @11:36PM (#6556585)
    Toy Symphony got really bad reviews. Sure, the technology is cool, but when you come down to it, it's still just kids banging on instruments and computers.

    I've heard one listenable piece created in Hyperscore, and that was by a kid who already knew how to compose music and worked around all the stuff in the program trying to compose for him.

  • License for HyperScore (Score:3, Informative)

    by Kaa ( 21510 ) on Tuesday July 29, 2003 @09:53AM (#6559098) Homepage
    HyperScore comes with an interesting license:

    If you use this software to create any compositions or musical/graphical materials, you hereby grant M.I.T. the nonexclusive right to use any such materials for any purpose, and to allow others to do the same, without any accounting to you.

    I read this as "all music composed using these tools enters public domain".

    I don't think this is a good thing. Philosophically I don't like licenses for tools to attempt control over what YOU make with these tools.
    • I don't think this is a good thing. Philosophically I don't like licenses for tools to attempt control over what YOU make with these tools.

      So use or write a different tool. People have different philosophies.

      Sorry, it had to be said.

  • Generative Art (Score:3, Interesting)

    by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdevers@cis.usou ... minus herbivore> on Tuesday July 29, 2003 @02:29PM (#6563019) Homepage Journal
    It's worth mentioning the whole generative art subculture, as researchable at (predictably enough) generative.net [generative.net]. These people are making music & other artworks to challenge the notion that computers can't create art, by coming up with automatic processes that as a side effect of their action product music, visual art, probably even sculpture if you look around hard enough.

    The idea is that, according to much conventional wisdom, "computers can't create creative, expressionistic artwork." But what is a computer program other than the pure, embodied result of some human's creative expression? If then someone creates a program to generate possibly interesting sounds or animations, is the art-piece that sound or animation, or are those merely a byproduct of the true art in the program itself?

    This is the sort of "angels on pinheads" question that can get the right group of people worked up into a tremendous debate :-)

    In any case, I'm willing to accept that this kind of generative work can produce interesting results.

    One of the most interesting things I've read about was a Perl script [generative.net] that took as input the archives of a mailing list and transformed it into a 10 minute musical piece, doing things like assigning different instruments to different people, having all the messages in a particular discussion thread be played in a certain note or key, etc. The net result was that you could very tangibly visualize the cadence of time, as the tempo of the music quickened or slowed, and certain threads would produce frantic bursts of noise while certain people's "voice" could be picked out here & there across the continuum.

    Arguably, this was just another way of "visually" representing the dataset; maybe a retooled version of the script could have produced some kind of mosiac or tapestry, or (more prosaically, but maybe more tantalizingly) a simple graph or chart. From that point of view, what this program did with the data was no more interesting than what a program like Excel does with spreadsheet graphs. But then you start to appreciate just how creative that must be on some level, and then start to wonder about the possibilities of expressing boring old tabular data sonically rather than visually.

    Would people have caught on to Enron's game sooner if their annual reports had been presented as a four part concerto in the key of D? Maybe... :-)

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