Topic: [DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated - page 300. (Read 1058949 times)

On the television show they use human actors to play the parts of holograms, that is merely another case of being able to switch the instruments. We should equally well be able to have a different bunch of actors play those same roles from that same script, even aliens ought to be able to enact it.

Sure right now we have to laboriously have humans enact plays and scripts and screenplays and such, but that is merely an implementation-detail.

Right now we use Battle for Wesnoth to author "holonovels" and "holodramas" and "holodocumentaries" because we have no holodecks yet. We are stuck looking at two-dimensional representations of the action and choices and characters. Those Battle for Wesnoth scenarios though can still be the same scenarios come the day we have three-dimensional rendering options to allow them to be enacted/played/executed in 3D, and eventually in all-around-you 3D whether via goggles or full screen all around you.

The important thing is we have the actual code of the scenario, not just a movie showing what one player saw on their screen while they played the scenario.

So different players can play it differently, and different input-output devices can have it look different with players able to make their choices via different input devices.

-MarkM-

Excellent. That's exactly what I would do. So we agree on this.

Go on...

Listen markm, I love the discussion we are having here. And appreciate all the thought experiments you provide.

If this was a forum about artificial intelligence, I would be delighted with the discussion we are having.

Some of the examples you give, like changing the speed of music playback has been possible for 50 years now, and is not really a novum.

On the other hand, you propose non-existent very advanced voice synthesizers and talk about them as if they would already exist, which does not help our situation in the here and now.

As I said before, I agree that for musical content it could be considered open source if the musician who created the music simply talks openly about the process of his music creation.
How did he do it, what tools did he use, in what way etc...

But that should be it. Let people first and foremost provide music for free (and get compensated in DVC), so other people can use that music for free in their projects.

So include with the score a hint saying "many people find it sounds best when played on a harpsichord; in particular using a piano is deprecated by some (reference provided, of course..." )

-MarkM-

I saw a site just recently where a youth orchestra (landphilharmonic, I think) uses intruments built from scrap found in landfills.

Duplicating all those instruments would indeed be hard. But you seem to jump from that to it being impossible or improbable to 3-D print a violin or to code a violin-sounds-synthesiser. To me that landphilharmonic showed much the opposite from it being hard to emulate instruments, to the contrary it seemed to indicate that you don't even need a 3-D printer, perfectly use-able instruments can be created even out of crap found in landfills, no need for special and possibly expensive 3D-printer-ink!

But nonetheless 3D printer code for creating all standard and umpteen non-standard instruments is something we should try to have.

And robotic arms for bending metal and working wood etc should be able eventually to use landfill materials too, they just would need a feedback process of some kind letting them try the tone, adjust the object, try the tone etc, "tuning" it until it sounds as good or almost as good as the ones the landphilharmonic uses.

Also plans and instructions and guides for humans on how to find suitable things in landfills and how best to adapt them for musical use would also be good to have.

-MarkM-

Scores can be considered writing, in a hieroglyphic language whose characters include things like quavers and semiquavers (demiquavers?) and treble-clefs and such.

It is maybe just another written language.

As for what it sounds like, you should be able to simply press play, or modify which instruments to use and press play, or select a start bar or note and an end bar or note and press play, etc. And like a wiki, even be able to edit it so over time the community of authors uh I mean composers can settle upon which edit to leave as the main one that visitors see/hear when they vivist the page since all previous states of the composition will also be available to them.

-MarkM-

I am sorry for the big fonts I used. No escalation was intended.

I just think that a few very fundamental questions about devcoin have now surfaced, that in my opinion don't reflect what I thought devcoin stands for.

I need clarification.

Yes, but only after having listened to music for many decades.

Much like a blind person can't really have a concept of colors, a musician who never heard music will not be able to hear music by simply reading the score.

Perfect example. Thank you very much!

But hey, after this discussion I would conclude that this is exactly what devtome secretly wants to achieve: to substitute the writer with an algorithm.


I agree.

Hey I like artificial intelligence. I would love nothing more than to one day have conversations with an android like data.

Devcoin should absolutely have a big section about artificial intelligence. But it shouldn't interfere or impose on the human intelligence of any participant that wants to contribute.

Supposedly a lot of "real musicans" could "hear" a piece by reading the score.

So it might be more effective use of people's time to have such musicians check the scores first before even bothering to impose some particular performance of a score using some particular voices and/or instruments and/or sound-effects upon the ears of people who cannot random-access the thing but must instead proceed serially through it, and maybe are not even able to listen to it in fast-forward to get a quick grok of it before delving down into nanosecond by nanosecond or second by second or minute by minute laborious executions of the score.

If the piece is good, but could be played in a way that would not sound so good, maybe the reviewers could also provide helpful hints such as approximately what range of instruments it should not sound too awful on, what kinds of speeds one could execute it at without losing its "artistic flavour" or "emotional appeal" and so on.

Like for example "assuming you'd normally play it on a 33-RPM turntable, this piece would make reasonable elevator music, but at 45-RPM it is much more stimulating, possibly not useful as background music, and at 78-RPM it would probably be more useful for cartoon soundtracks than for romantic background music for a candlelight dinner; By the way if you turn up the drum track and use this type of drum, you might find it affects more people in thus and such a way, whereas if you substitute piccolos for the oboes you might find it tends rather to suit X type of game-scenario" and so on.

Or "best suited for playing using husky female vocalist-instrument, if you go with a bass male voice you might also want to adjust this and that instrument in that and that way".

Or "recommended to be played in a minor key, however it also sounds very nice when played in the key of E flat" etc.

-MarkM-

Maybe I'm just being sensitive, but this discussion seems to be escalating and I don't know if that's productive. This is just a discussion on a forum thread-- brainstorming, opinions, et cetera. What's actually implemented is a system that pays creators for creating, currently limited to writing. Personally I'd look at how the project has actually manifested as opposed to unmanifested ideas.

The limitations and challenges of expanding the system to include other content such as music have already been outlined. They will take time and people-power to implement, and that's just a logistical reality at this point.

Here are some bounty updates:


Once the website is complete, Hypersire will get 36 shares.


There is a 1 share bounty left for informative posts > 50 words (please correct me if I'm wrong).  Shakezula will get the 12 shares if there is no objection to it.


A 9 share award is still available for another chart.


For a post >50 words about OT, a three share bounty is available.


If there are no objections this will be the final share division.


You can still get 2/5 share for being a seed node.


A new bounty from today.  If there are no objections, it will go into effect in four days.


Another new bounty.  It is only open to people who have received a coding bounty.  If you have received a bounty for web development, your eligibility may be negotiable.


A third new bounty.  It will go into effect in four days if there are no objections.


Finally, a bounty still remains for a marketplace.

I'm kind of confused by why this project would exclude a musical equivalent of Devtome. The equivalent of what you're describing for writing would be an AI that can output readable and uniquely stylistic prose, but that's not what Devtome asks for. It relies on human generated content and the ability to share and remix that content. How are people going to crawl into my closed source brain to see how I think of topics, conceptualize storylines, and string sentences together? Would there be a category that said, "I want a low-sci-fi voice tagged first-person and dark humor vs an academic voice tagged archaic english lexicon?" (Definitely an interesting concept that I wouldn't have thought of without this discussion). It seems more practical to put the writing up, and also put explain the writing process if there's enough interest for it.

I think the CC BY-SA license and opensource are highly compatible concepts, but they're not strictly the same thing. There might be a demand for open-source voice synthesizers and that is a very different project than human generated content that is not locked away by copyright. Both are valid, and the degree of their implementation will depend on the demand.

I don't question his programming skills.

But much like I can't advice him on how to create a cryptocoin, he shouldn't advice musicians how to create music.

Then the only advice I strongly want to give to the admins is that devcoin should remove its current advertizing slogans.

Devcoin does NOT desire to help artists create stuff and get payed for their work .
Instead (after this discussion) I conclude that the goal of devcoin is to create artificial substitutions for every human artform that exists, subsequently rendering those same artists obsolete by aiming to create algorithms and technics that will supposedly imitate every aspect of art so well that the illusion of human art will emerge without the need for a real human artist.

You gotta be kidding me.  

Please, this all must be a misunderstanding, right?

Worldinacoin has given up on signing up new writers. I want Dinkleberg to be an admin, and he chose signing up new writers, so he will handle new writers whose name starts with P-Z.

If any new writer sent a message to Worldinacoin and didn't get a reply, please contact Dinkleberg.

markm was one of the original developers of devcoin, I believe, so his opinion carries a lot of weight.

The means to create the music should be open to everyone is what it means to be open source.

Most artforms that will not work that way are basically one-frame or one possible sequence of execution things, very often deliberately cheating us out of having access to the source because our current society forces people to have to come up with make-work programmes to ensure their future access to "replicator rations" both in the sense of access to food clothing and shelter and in the sense of breeding-rights, the ability to and/or permission to breed.

Basically artists keep trying to hold back the actual how it is or was done to try to force people to have to come back to them all the time. They try to conceal the actual source code - the actual how such things are done or were done. In other words they try to hold back the source code and/or the source data.

Just like in the case of text we want the actual sequence of heiroglyphs, letters, or punctuation rather than a scan (partly because a scan has extraneous information in the form of what font the copy that was scanned happened to be using), for everything in general we want the what to use in what manner and sequence.

Individual paintings are merely examples of the output of a painter.

We want painters, so we can then re-create any of the paintings that particular painting-object or that particular painting-program has painted or could paint.

The source: the that which it takes to produce the sample output and which can also produce oodles more stuff simply by tweaking it, adjusting it, having it do its routines in a different order or with different brushes and so on.

One single static image is just like a scan of an article printed in a particular font.

We should be wanting the actual "content" of the article, so we can then tweak for ourselves which font we'd like to see it in, and we can correct any spelling errors if we choose, or introduce spelling errors that we happen to like such as changing English spelling to American spelling or vice-versa.

We want the equivalent of a wiki-for-music, that is a site where anyone can edit any piece of music, any of the instruments used to play it and so on, not just some historical snapshot of what one of the many many many permutations of the components of that piece happened to look like between some edit/change and some other edit/change.

A composer site maybe and a paint site, along with models of all kinds of objects so one can tell it "okay now put in Einstein leaning over the piano... no, give him a bow tie like Doctor Who's bow tie... okay now lets have Marilyn Monroe leaning seductively over him but with her hand in the piano player's pocket... good, good, now make the piano player be Chopin... nice, nice, now lets put Mozart in the audience..." and so on....

-MarkM-

Please watch Star Trek: the new generation enough to observe at least one episode in which someone says "computer, some musicians, please" and presto, the computer creates some professional musicians. Maybe even simulations/emulations of specific musicians.

That is where we are aiming.

We ultimately want/need to be able to say "computer, show me Sinatra singing that. Hmm no, start over but lets try having Madonna sing it. Hmm, better, okay give me Blondie singing it..." and so on.

-MarkM-

I wonder do you want any participation of real artists in the devcoin project?

You just said you would prefer an open source voice synthesizer instead of those closed source singers.  

I installed some of the open source voice synthesizers some months ago on a linux server.... they all sound horribly unrealistic, but I'll admit that they are hilarious and nonetheless funny to play with. lol

I hope your opinion is not representative of the devcoin community?

Maybe you misread me. I don't regret one penny I invested in musical hardware and instruments. My older instrument I even consider a valuable asset. I enjoy it every time I sit in front of it.
I was just saying that some people might find what I invested a really big amount of money. Amounts they normally associate with the purchase of a new car, etc...

There are old instruments, hundreds of years old. You surely heard of the stradivari violin. I for one like harpsichords, and any harpsichord fan will tell you that only the real thing has that special sound.

No reproduction whatsoever comes even near to a real harpsichord. (I know I have tested every single harpsichord simulation that came out in the last 15 years)

So please forgive me, but I have to chuckle when I hear you propose 3-D printers (that don't even exist yet aside from very basic prototypes) that will recreate whole instruments. Oh and how much will a hypothetical 3-D printer cost, that can here and now recreate a musical instrument will all it's nuances? Wait, they don't exist yet. I see...  

I try to live in the here and now (what you call "dark ages"), and won't let dreams about a hypothetical future cloud my judgment.

Sorry, but you start to sound like those guys from the zeitgeist movement.