Just now my computer played an MP3 that I'm sure I've never heard before. I thought I knew exactly what music I had on my hard disk, but perhaps my collection has grown so large that it has started to breed!

Probably not, but wouldn't it be cool if you could breed MP3s? You'd need a program that could distil a song down into a fundamental description of how it is made up (a "genome" if you like) - perhaps using fractal and/or neural algorithms. Then you'd need another program which can combine two genomes to create a third, perhaps adding a bit of randomness for luck. The final program takes a genome and turns it back into an MP3 (this is the simplest bit - it would probably something like a sophisticated MOD player).

Of course, sometimes the result would be terrible, but perhaps sometimes it would be wonderful - maybe even better than either of the songs that you started with!
-- aj, Apr 11 2001

mp3 mixer http://www.mp3machi...re/4Tracks_MP3_Mix/
4-track mp3 mixer. there's a few variations on this theme out there. [mihali, Apr 11 2001, last modified Oct 04 2004]

David Cope's EMI software http://tuba.music.g...r/articles/Computer
Extracts the 'genome' from a composer's oeuvre [Trouvere, Apr 11 2001, last modified Oct 04 2004]

Amazing Slow Downer http://www.ronimusic.com/
changes the speed of audio without modifying the pitch, or vice versa. Quite fun. [Macwarrior, Oct 04 2004]

Statistically Optimal Music http://eigenradio.media.mit.edu/
Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. [bakert, Oct 04 2004]

WaveNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WaveNet
mentioned in my anno [notexactly, Feb 07 2018]

GIGO; If you bred Ricky, Britney, and Celine, you would no doubt have at least 7 albums worth of hits. Cannibal Corpse, Yanni, and Irish folk would make for truly interesting listening.
-- absterge, Apr 11 2001


The hardest part of this would be the distillation of the song into the genome. The actual cross-breeding of melodies has been done many times, including a not-altogether-unshoddy effort by myself.
-- -alx, Jul 05 2001


I have thought about this before, to get a song's genome, you do a fourier transform of it, which according to my imagination would produce something fractal-like. If it is not an inspiring pattern then it would have to be re-transformed in a way that somehow visually impresses an artist. Then the artist could edit it, or else, a computer program could do a simple logic function between two songs (+, AND, OR, XOR). Back to the aesthetic retransformation... it would have to be based on the how the mind hears musical notes (this I don't know too much about). I once heard that there was something called an "unfinished symphony"... This is stupid but I thought that if it were fourier transformed and untransformed in a longer "time domain" maybe there would be a phantom of what the rest of the music would sound like. (What really happens in this case is that the fragment either repeats or reverses beyond the end of the piece). The last idea I have about musicsex is probably the simplest and best: MORPH two songs together and the midpoint is the baby!
-- mr2560, Jan 09 2003


I've no idea how this could work (and the talk of Fourier transforms just make my eyebrows hurt) but I'm gonna vote for it out of raw enthusiasm.
-- sadie, Jan 16 2003


Perhaps a reverse boomerang style of DSP would work. Of course, you'd need some tone/series analysis programs to get both the pieces in the same key - i think Amazing Slow Downer will do it. [link].

You'd also have to do some beat-matching and perhaps tone-jump analysis to get all the notes to be good, but who knows? People call fractal "music" a kind of song, so you could easily get away with this.
-- Macwarrior, Mar 24 2003


tru, but how many people have 1,000+ MIDI files on their computer (other than professional musicians)?
-- Macwarrior, Mar 25 2003


Macwarrior's annotation has merit - a special pitch-modding, phase-altered DSP program that can do things like 50/50 (half one artist's style and half the other's), + (a full join of the two), logical AND of two characteristics, logical OR of two characteristics, maybe an XOR or subtractive (nothing in common). But this idea is worth my "for" vote.
-- rudyvalencia, Oct 17 2004


One nice thing about genes is that they code proteins, which at the organisms sometimes do far reaching things (keratin->much of an entire body covering (skin))

So if you make your genes things like Beats per minute (BPM) some very simple sex would make previous music faster and more emotionally upbeat. Another source of "proteins" might be conventions of techno remixing (trim most of the lyrics out, using only the hook to a new "backbeat" to make a new song)

If someone could make a library of "hooks" or possiblly choruses from a few ten thousand popular songs, it might be possible to have multiple hooks per new song, at a faster BPM. This seems like it could cause fresh popularity
-- beanangel, Sep 24 2017


DeepMind's WaveNet technology [link] could probably be applied to this pretty easily.
-- notexactly, Feb 07 2018



random, halfbakery