Simon Willison's Weblog: music

Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?

2026-01-03T05:57:07+00:00

Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?

Depending on how you measure it, the tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger appears to be 123.45 beats per minute.

This is one of those things that's so cool I'm just going to accept it as true.

(I only today learned from the Hacker News comments that Veridis Quo is "Very Disco", and if you flip the order of those words you get Discovery, the name of the album.)

Via Kottke

Tags: music

Magenta RealTime: An Open-Weights Live Music Model

2025-06-20T22:24:00+00:00

Magenta RealTime: An Open-Weights Live Music Model

Fun new "live music model" release from Google DeepMind:

Today, we’re happy to share a research preview of Magenta RealTime (Magenta RT), an open-weights live music model that allows you to interactively create, control and perform music in the moment. [...]

As an open-weights model, Magenta RT is targeted towards eventually running locally on consumer hardware (currently runs on free-tier Colab TPUs). It is an 800 million parameter autoregressive transformer model trained on ~190k hours of stock music from multiple sources, mostly instrumental.

No details on what that training data was yet, hopefully they'll describe that in the forthcoming paper.

For the moment the code is on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license and the weights are on HuggingFace under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

The easiest way to try the model out is using the provided Magenta_RT_Demo.ipynb Colab notebook.

It takes about ten minutes to set up, but once you've run the first few cells you can start interacting with it like this:

Via VB

Tags: google, music, ai, generative-ai

Knowledge Worker

2024-10-20T23:16:25+00:00

Knowledge Worker

Forrest Brazeal:

Last month, I performed a 30-minute show called "Knowledge Worker" for the incredible audience at Gene Kim's ETLS in Las Vegas.

The show included 7 songs about the past, present, and future of "knowledge work" - or, more specifically, how it's affecting us, the humans between keyboard and chair. I poured everything I've been thinking and feeling about AI for the last 2+ years into this show, and I feel a great sense of peace at having said what I meant to say.

Videos of all seven songs are included in the post, with accompanying liner notes. AGI (Artificial God Incarnate) is a banger, and What’s Left for Me? (The AI Existential Crisis Song) captures something I've been trying to think through for a while.

Via Matt Campbell

Tags: music, ai, forrest-brazeal

Bop Spotter

2024-09-30T19:03:03+00:00

Bop Spotter

Riley Walz: "I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below."

Some details on how it works from Riley on Twitter:

The phone has a Tasker script running on loop (even if the battery dies, it’ll restart when it boots again)

Script records 10 min of audio in airplane mode, then comes out of airplane mode and connects to nearby free WiFi.

Then uploads the audio file to my server, which splits it into 15 sec chunks that slightly overlap. Passes each to Shazam’s API (not public, but someone reverse engineered it and made a great Python package). Phone only uses 2% of power every hour when it’s not charging!

Via Kellan

Tags: android, hardware-hacking, music

Niche Museums: The Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection

2024-09-27T22:23:59+00:00

Niche Museums: The Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection

DjangoCon was in Durham, North Carolina this year and thanks to Atlas Obscura I found out about the fabulous Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection. We got together a group of five for a visit and had a wonderful time being shown around the collection by curator Vincent Simonetti. This is my first update to Niche Museums in quite a while, it's nice to get that project rolling again.

Tags: museums, music

State-of-the-art music scanning by Soundslice

2024-06-20T04:37:28+00:00

State-of-the-art music scanning by Soundslice

It's been a while since I checked in on Soundslice, Adrian Holovaty's beautiful web application focused on music education.

The latest feature is spectacular. The Soundslice music editor - already one of the most impressive web applications I've ever experienced - can now import notation directly from scans or photos of sheet music.

The attention to detail is immaculate. The custom machine learning model can handle a wide variety of notation details, and the system asks the user to verify or correct details that it couldn't perfectly determine using a neatly designed flow.

Free accounts can scan two single page documents a month, and paid plans get a much higher allowance. I tried it out just now on a low resolution image I found on Wikipedia and it did a fantastic job, even allowing me to listen to a simulated piano rendition of the music once it had finished processing.

It's worth spending some time with the release notes for the feature to appreciate how much work they've out into improving it since the initial release.

If you're new to Soundslice, here's an example of their core player interface which syncs the display of music notation to an accompanying video.

Adrian wrote up some detailed notes on the machine learning behind the feature when they first launched it in beta back in November 2022.

OMR [Optical Music Recognition] is an inherently hard problem, significantly more difficult than text OCR. For one, music symbols have complex spatial relationships, and mistakes have a tendency to cascade. A single misdetected key signature might result in multiple incorrect note pitches. And there’s a wide diversity of symbols, each with its own behavior and semantics — meaning the problems and subproblems aren’t just hard, there are many of them.

Tags: adrian-holovaty, machine-learning, music, ocr, ai

Printing music with CSS Grid

2024-05-02T14:28:33+00:00

Printing music with CSS Grid

Stephen Bond demonstrates some ingenious tricks for creating surprisingly usable sheet music notation using clever application of CSS grids.

It uses rules like .stave > [data-duration="0.75"] { grid-column-end: span 18; } to turn data- attributes for musical properties into positions on the rendered stave.

Via Hacker News

Tags: css, music

Wikipedia: Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society

2024-03-05T16:21:06+00:00

Wikipedia: Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society

I created my first Wikipedia page! The Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society is a really neat live music venue in Half Moon Bay which has been showcasing world-class jazz talent for over 50 years. I attended a concert there for the first time on Sunday and was surprised to see it didn’t have a page yet.

Creating a Wikipedia page is an interesting process. New pages on English Wikipedia created by infrequent editors stay in “draft” mode until they’ve been approved by a member of “WikiProject Articles for creation”—the standards are really high, especially around sources of citations. I spent quite a while tracking down good citation references for the key facts I used in my first draft for the page.

Via @simon@simonwillison.net

Tags: music, wikipedia, half-moon-bay

The Commodordion

2022-10-21T23:36:10+00:00

The Commodordion

The Commodordion is “an 8-bit accordion primarily made of C64s, floppy disks, and gaffer tape” by Linus Åkesson. It’s absolutely beautiful.

Via Hacker News

Tags: commodore, hacks, music

Weeknotes: first week of Stanford classes

2019-09-30T16:28:12+00:00

One of the benefits of the JSK fellowship is that I can take classes and lectures at Stanford, on a somewhat ad-hoc basis (I don’t take exams or earn credits).

With thousands of courses to chose from, figuring out how best to take advantage of this isn’t at all easy - especially since I want to spend a big portion of my time focusing on my fellowship project.

This week was the first week of classes, which Stanford calls “shopping week” - because students are encouraged to try out lots of different things and literally walk out half way through a lecture if they decide it’s not for them! Feels really rude to me, but apparently that’s how it works here.

For this term I’ve settled on four classes:

Strategic Communications, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. This is an extremely highly regarded course on public speaking and effective written communication. As you might expect from a class on public speaking the lectures themselves have been case studies in how to communicate well. I’ve given dozens of conference talks and I’m already learning a huge amount from this that will help me perform better in the future.
Classical Guitar. I’m taking this with three other fellows. It turns out my cheap acoustic guitar (bought on an impulse a couple of years ago from Amazon Prime Now) isn’t the correct instrument for this class (Classical Guitars are nylon stringed and a different shape) but the instructor thinks it will be fine for the moment. Great opportunity to do something musical!
Biostatistics. I want to firm up my fundamental knowledge of statistics, and I figured learning it from the biology department would be much more interesting than the corresponding maths or computer science classes.
Media Innovation. This is a lunchtime series of guest lectures from different professionals in different parts of the media industry. As such it doesn’t have much homework (wow, Stanford courses have a lot of homework) which makes it a good fit for my schedule, and the variety of speakers look to be really informative.

Combined with the JSK afternoon sessions on Monday, Wednesday and Friday I’ll be on campus every weekday, which will hopefully help me build a schedule that incorporates plenty of useful conversations with people about my project, plus actual time to get some code written.

… what with all the shopping for classes, I wrote almost no code at all this week!

I did some experimentation with structlog - I have an unfinished module which can write structlog entries to a SQLite database using sqlite-utils (here’s a Gist) and I’ve been messing around with Python threads in a Jupyter notebook as part of ongoing research into smarter connection pooling for Datasette but aside from that I’ve been concentrating on figuring out Stanford.

Books

Stanford classes come with all sorts of required reading, but I’ve also made some progress on Just Enough Research by Erika Hall (mentioned last week). I’m about half way through and it’s fantastic - really fun to read and packed with useful tips on getting the most out of user interviews and associated techniques. Hopefully I’ll get to start putting it into practice next week!

Tags: music, reading, speaking, stanford, jsk, weeknotes

Music: The Geeking

2010-05-12T12:43:00+00:00

Music: The Geeking

More on Simon Tatham’s Gonville music font. He concluded that “Bézier curves are not a good tool for font design”, and instead switched to using curves based on involutes of circles with his own custom curve design tool.

Tags: lilypond, music, recovered, bezier, curves, gonville, simon-tatham

Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas

2010-05-12T08:53:00+00:00

Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas

A pretty decent effort at rendering musical notation using JavaScript and the canvas element.

Tags: canvas, javascript, music, recovered

Gonville: a font of musical symbols, compatible with GNU Lilypond

2010-05-12T08:51:00+00:00

Gonville: a font of musical symbols, compatible with GNU Lilypond

By Simon Tatham. I thoroughly recommend taking a look at the source code—it’s written in Python, contains detailed comments and defines every musical symbol using co-ordinates and trigonometry.

Tags: lilypond, music, recovered, gonville, simon-tatham

Revisiting the click track

2010-02-15T09:35:23+00:00

Revisiting the click track

Paul Lamere uses the new Echo Nest API to access analysis data for music tracks and plot the beats per minute, making it easy to spot bands or drummers using a click track or drum machine to stay in tempo.

Tags: clicktrack, echonest, music

Help! My iPod thinks I'm emo - Part 1

2009-03-30T10:11:47+00:00

Help! My iPod thinks I'm emo - Part 1

Detailed write-up of one of my favourite panels from this year’s SxSW, on music recommendation engines.

Tags: music, recommendation, sxsw

How Companies Pay Artists to Include Brands in Lyrics

2008-09-20T12:16:52+00:00

How Companies Pay Artists to Include Brands in Lyrics

“We just feel that if it’s a product that’s admired by the artist and fits his/her image, we now have the capability of leveling out the playing field and making things financially beneficial for all parties involved.” Charming.

Tags: branddropping, marketing, music

Musical hackery

2007-11-22T17:03:43+00:00

Musical hackery

Indescribably clever musical video game creation, where images from classic games spell out their own theme tunes. The smartest thing I’ve seen on YouTube, well, ever.

Tags: games, genius, hack, music, youtube

Radiohead Album Available for Free, But Fileshared Anyway

2007-10-18T17:39:43+00:00

Radiohead Album Available for Free, But Fileshared Anyway

“Why are some people getting In Rainbows from P2P rather than the band’s site? Probably because they find P2P easier to use.”

Tags: ed-felten, filesharing, inrainbows, music, p2p, radiohead, usability

Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context

2007-10-08T21:10:16+00:00

Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context

Fantastic presentation from Ian Rogers, the head of Yahoo! Music, who has spent 8 years watching DRM cripple the online music industry.

Tags: drm, ian-rogers, music, yahoo, yahoo-music

Quoting John Gruber

2007-09-14T08:15:01+00:00

For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.

— John Gruber

Tags: apple, iphone, john-gruber, music, ringtones, ripoff

Quoting Fake Steve Jobs

2007-07-05T12:03:58+00:00

The music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution.

— Fake Steve Jobs

Tags: apple, fakestevejobs, loansharks, music, riaa