Bagel Music...wave of the future (excuse the cliche). Random music generation has already become somewhat popular. Add an organic element with Bagel Music! Just throw your half sliced bagel on the ol' "Bagel Disc Drive" and enjoy hours of music, each experience completely different than the last! The Bagel Disc Drive would read the bagel media similar to the method used in current Compact Disc technology. Ever look at the surface of a sliced bagel? Pits and vallies! Perfect for the generation of music. The best part? No two bagels will be exactly alike! Oh, it's music to my ears. Bagel-music visualization, anyone? Standardized bagel sizes would be needed...or maybe you could have a bagel cutter that trims it down to the Bagel Disc Drive standard size? Not only would the music be random, but it would CHANGE based on the moisture of the bagel! Your favourite piece of Bagel Music could surprise you by becoming even better the next time you play it. For those in the UK, might you prefer English Muffin Music?
So the idea isn't completely serious...oh, who am I kidding, it's completely rediculous, but I'm bored...and bagels, well...they're bagels! I mean, come on!-- Legend, Jun 16 2001 Raymond Scott http://raymondscott.com/em.html [Op, Jun 16 2001, last modified Oct 04 2004] You could add some depth if your reader read optical values as well as texture so that all sorts of things would make sounds--cinnamon flecks, sesame seeds, bits of dirt from the baker's floor, etc. Would bagels play Jewish music? A kaiser roll a German drinking song? A hotdog bun something by Al Jolson? Or is that altogether too stereotyped?-- Dog Ed, Jun 16 2001 Bagel music should be something for all to enjoy...But if you want to extend it to bread music...or perhaps ALL 'baked' goods...oh, the possibilities are endless! And if you knew what GENRE of music you were getting, and there was still some way to randomize the music itself and make it consistent with the genre...Great idea! I wonder if we could engineer it so that bacteria make their own distinct sounds? Eliminates all of that nasty subculturing and biohazardous pathogens! Just 'play' your bread to find out whether or not your baker is screwing you! (well, not literally, but pathogenic bacteria...not something I associate with 'yummy', anyways)-- Legend, Jun 16 2001 Does this mean that I'm the only person that was ever curious enough to put round flat things on my parent's record player to see what they sounded like?
If you're wondering, it wasn't great.-- -alx, Jun 16 2001 Thank you for your insightful commentary, [egnor]. Next time I think up a somewhat stupid idea that I think others might get a laugh out of, I'll just smack myself upside the head with a trout...or even a lamprey! They're roughly the same shape, right? I just thought it might be interesting to hear a bagel! Guess I was wrong. Thank you for helping out a misguided young vagrant! Oh, and by the way, I thought I'd steal the square brackets, too. They're wild! Another aside - Love how you snuck that pun in there, Rods Tiger!-- Legend, Jun 17 2001 [PeterSealy]: New crusade? I've always been snarky, if you'll recall.
To quote from the help file: "Ideas are best if they're possible, or impossible in interesting ways. ... Generally, the more you know (and can explain!) about the technology behind your idea, the more interesting the idea will be. As always, when it doubt, write about what you know." This idea is clearly not possible; I suppose tastes differ on whether or not it's impossible in an "interesting" way.
I can get random silliness anywhere; here, it's just noise in my signal. But, opinion clearly varies on this topic.-- egnor, Jun 17 2001 Now let's not get our umbrellas all in a wasps' nest. I kind of like egnor's self-labeled snarkiness. But there are a number of software apps which make 'music' from things like the Morse-Thue sequence, and since the voids and doughy bits in bread are semi-random in an ordered way, they might produce something of interest to the same sort of people who find number-sequence music interesting. (I tinker with FracMus and Musinum; my wife thinks it's stupid.) And really, a bagel reader would just have to read reflectivity values and that's relatively easy. Assigning pitch and timbre to the raw input would be similar, I would think, to what already exists in software. The result would probably sound best after several stiff drinks.-- Dog Ed, Jun 17 2001 PeterSealy: I disagree. This is possible, but useless in an incredibly obvious and boring way. I agree with egnor; it's just noise.-- bookworm, Jun 17 2001 I didn't intend to offend anyone. Sorry if I did. I just figured it'd be a laugh to think about. And as for explaining it technologically, I'm sorry if you didn't get the reference to CD tech...pits and vallies, you know? Read up on it, it might make more sense. Anyways, no offense intended. Sorry if it pissed you off. Oh, and PeterSealy, fifty dollars says that the idea will be baked within a year, despite the idiocy of it ;)-- Legend, Jun 18 2001 Thanks, UB. That's what I get for being a newbie here, anyways. I'll come up with something more practical, honestly! Only it'll be when I'm an old man on my deathbed..."Son, if you want to be the saviour of humanity, you must reveal to them the secrets of...GAH....." *promptly dies*. My life story. I had this great idea about these electronic doohickeys that do millions of calculations in a single second...then my plane crashed and I lost my memory! I remember the name though...Banana Computing Devices, I think it was.-- Legend, Jun 18 2001 Loud noises in the oven while the bagels are being baked will send shock waves through the moist dough mixture. If these occur at precisely the moment of bagel phase transition from liquid to solid, the wave will be frozen in the bagel's porous structure and replayable with the right kind of baked-goods audio equipment.-- hippo, Jun 18 2001 We already have weather-displaying toast; why not music-playing bagels? I think this would certainly be possible (not using exactly the same technologies as CDs, but something else, such as what Dog Ed mentioned). And as for whether it would be of any use or value, I think that will have to wait until we hear what sort of music a bagel actually makes.-- PotatoStew, Jun 19 2001 maybe it could be like one of those greeting cards with the little music box inside, so that when you sliced the bagel open a tune would play, and when you closed it after spreading your cream cheese, for example, the music would stop. of course, it would have to be an edible music box...-- mihali, Jun 19 2001 Listen to the bagels of night and the sweet music that they make.-- Aristotle, Jun 19 2001 This all makes me think of Raymond Scott and his improbable Electronium, a device which seemingly created songs after the user defined various elements such as pitch and timbre (as [Dog Ed] suggests). If you just toss a bagel (or lava lamp) in to the equation some where, it would provide randomly different songs each time. If the machine is designed smartly, it would not be noise but randomly created music. See link for Raymond Scott info.-- Op, Jun 19 2001 I'll take that bet, but please clarify the terms and conditions first. What does it mean for this idea to be baked? Are you allowed to "bake" it in some simple way just to collect the $50?-- egnor, Jun 19 2001 Curse you, egnor. I was hoping to fool you into giving me a cool $50... I was just going to bake some bagels and use drum sticks on them. I guess you saw through my scheme from the beginning!! I'll just have to be more cunning next time.-- Legend, Jun 20 2001 Perhaps not, UB...maybe we should develop a sister-device to the Bagel Disc Drive...the Chicken Drive. Sadly, I'm a veg...so I really couldn't advocate a Chicken-oriented Drive ;.)-- Legend, Jun 20 2001 Legend, out of your box I see...
Great idea but I would think it would be more convenient to have this music in a slightly more portable state. Perhaps the manufacturing of mini bagels would be more appropriate making a much more portable product as well as avoiding potential clutter in your bagel music collection.-- Crayola, Jun 20 2001 Kiki, had you bothered to read either the main idea or any of the annotations, you would have noticed that the songs aren't 'stored' on the bagel. The 'bagel reader' (for lack of a better term) uses reflective technology to read the texture of the bagel (the hills and valleys, again for lack of a better term) and convert the data into sound . I hope that's a bit clearer. Sorry if this annotation is a bit snarky...I just don't appreciate being belittled by someone who doesn't care to read a paragraph.-- Legend, Jun 21 2001 In what way do Cream Cheese Rings impact this idea?-- PotatoStew, Jun 21 2001 random, halfbakery