Daniel D. Johnson (Posts about composition)

Reading an Artificial Mind: Visualizing the Neural Net

Daniel D. Johnson — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 19:51:51 GMT

In my previous post, I described my music-composing neural network. In some of the time since then, I extracted some interesting images to visualize the neural network's internal state. And this is what I got:

Composing Music With Recurrent Neural Networks

Daniel D. Johnson — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:53:44 GMT

(Update: A paper based on this work has been accepted at EvoMusArt 2017! See here for more details.)

It's hard not to be blown away by the surprising power of neural networks these days. With enough training, so called "deep neural networks", with many nodes and hidden layers, can do impressively well on modeling and predicting all kinds of data. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, I recommend reading about recurrent character-level language models, Google Deep Dream, and neural Turing machines. Very cool stuff!) Now seems like as good a time as ever to experiment with what a neural network can do.

For a while now, I've been floating around vague ideas about writing a program to compose music. My original idea was based on a fractal decomposition of time and some sort of repetition mechanism, but after reading more about neural networks, I decided that they would be a better fit. So a few weeks ago, I got to work designing my network. And after training for a while, I am happy to report remarkable success!

Here's a taste of things to come:

Trying out Ableton Live

Daniel D. Johnson — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 20:53:39 GMT

A few weeks ago, I downloaded a trial version of Ableton Live and fiddled around with it. I wrote two short songs, and I thought I may as well put them up here. So, without further ado, here are the two songs I have written:

Street Corners

Fission

I've been exploring some different styles that I like, so they are quite different in content, and I haven't really edited them that much. Even so, though, I think they are pretty cool. I kinda pulled the names out of thin air, so don't expect any deep metaphors or anything.