Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43320207

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Hello! My name is Cortland Mahoney.

I'm a music researcher, software engineer, and producer. I made Story Jam.

This doc is intended to inform you of not just the product, but the centuries of work that have led up to its implementation.

Are you tired of the barriers in traditional music composition? Story Jam is here to break them down.

Designed for anyone with creative ideas — from poets to film directors — our tool offers a new way to create and edit chord progressions, powered by cutting-edge music theory.

*Who Story Jam is for: Storytellers*

Story Jam makes music composition accessible and meaningful to anybody, with or without musical training.

It is designed for those who crave musical control but struggle with traditional composition methods. This includes film directors, slam poets, and self-taught musicians.

Story Jam is not music production software. Do not expect fancy sounds or synthesizers. It's purely a composition tool, designed to spark your creative process.

*Try it out!*

The demo is free on the homepage, no login required!

This is an MVP, so it has an "introductory" feature set. Feature requests welcome; help me build the product you want.

*The chord progression suggestion logic*

This service is built on a novel new music theory I have developed called Monic Theory.

Monic Theory is a rigorous proof for music. Not "Western music": music.

Monic Theory describes the tonal space of any conventional music on earth (except noise music. For that just use `Math.random()`). It describes the static and transient function of chords, instantaneously and differentially over time. This model enables empirical measurement of chords and the relationship between chords.

(hint: It is nothing you have seen in Xenharmonic Alliance. This is a new approach I have been developing over the past 10 years.)

Therefore, Monic Theory enables us to describe (or "predict" if you will) a chord progression to invoke a certain feeling.

*Music Composition*

Three people who helped set up the environment for Monic Theory are composers Paul Hindemith and Harry Partch , and music theorist Heinrich Schenker.

These folks independently contributed new ideas to music composition and analysis. All of these people lived without access to rapid computation. This is critical for the Partch case, as he computed many tables of frequencies by hand to support his compositional technique.

Partch recognized the human-math-music relation in "Genesis of a Music." He includes in this text some samples of his hand-computed tables of frequency values of overtones and (importantly) undertones which support the basis is technique.

Partch's techniques were so far-fetched that he had to construct new instruments to perform his scores. Similarly, I had to build a digital synthesizer to render the output of Monic Theory. (See: https://github.com/ckmahoney/raudio).

*About me*

I was a working composer and violinist from 2007 until 2017, and I have been a software engineer for the past 7.5 years.

I was a volunteer organizer for Livecode.NYC, an NYC livecode community; and am the volunteer creator of Data Dancers, Atlanta's livecode community. I am passionate about algorithmic art and have provided about a dozen workshops over four years on the topic.

https://ckmahoney.github.io/portfolio/posts/livecoding/

thank you for reading.

May the flow of Spices be with you :) naltroc

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43269816

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I'm a music researcher, software engineer, and producer. I made Story Jam.

This doc is intended to inform you of not just the product, but the centuries of work that have led up to its implementation.

> Are you tired of the barriers in traditional music composition? Story Jam is here to break them down.

> Designed for anyone with creative ideas — from poets to film directors — our tool offers a new way to create and edit chord progressions, powered by cutting-edge music theory.

*The product*

https://storyjam.tenpens.ink

v1.0.0

The UI is inspired by https://neal.fun. Neal has fun, simple, addictive, and intuitive designs and I hope Story Jam has that too.

*Who Story Jam is for: Storytellers*

Story Jam makes music composition accessible and meaningful to anybody, with or without musical training.

It is designed for those who crave musical control but struggle with traditional composition methods. This includes film directors, slam poets, and self-taught musicians.

Story Jam is not music production software. Do not expect fancy sounds or synthesizers. It's purely a composition tool, designed to spark your creative process.

*Try it out!*

The demo is free on the homepage, no login required!

This is an MVP, so it has an "introductory" feature set. Feature requests welcome; help me build the product you want.

*How it was made*

This service is built with:

- Monic Theory

- Yew (Rust) frontend

- TypeScript/Express webserver

- Postgres database

- Hosting by https://render.com

- Stripe API

- SendGrid (email) API

- Dygma Defy keyboard

- Love

*The chord progression suggestion logic*

This service is built on a novel new music theory I have developed called Monic Theory.

Monic Theory is a rigorous proof for music. Not "Western music": music.

Monic Theory describes the tonal space of any conventional music on earth (except noise music. For that just use `Math.random()`). It describes the static and transient function of chords, instantaneously and differentially over time. This model enables empirical measurement of chords and the relationship between chords.

(hint: It is nothing you have seen in Xenharmonic Alliance. This is a new approach I have been developing over the past 10 years.)

Therefore, Monic Theory enables us to describe (or "predict" if you will) a chord progression to invoke a certain feeling.

*Music Composition*

Three people who helped set up the environment for Monic Theory are composers Paul Hindemith and Harry Partch , and music theorist Heinrich Schenker.

These folks independently contributed new ideas to music composition and analysis. All of these people lived without access to rapid computation. This is critical for the Partch case, as he computed many tables of frequencies by hand to support his compositional technique.

Partch recognized the human-math-music relation in "Genesis of a Music." He includes in this text some samples of his hand-computed tables of frequency values of overtones and (importantly) undertones which support the basis is technique.

Partch's techniques were so far-fetched that he had to construct new instruments to perform his scores. Similarly, I had to build a digital synthesizer to render the output of Monic Theory. (See: https://github.com/ckmahoney/raudio).

*About me*

I was a working composer and violinist from 2007 until 2017, and I have been a software engineer for the past 7.5 years.

*Livecoding*

I was a volunteer organizer for Livecode.NYC, an NYC livecode community; and am the volunteer creator of Data Dancers, Atlanta's livecode community. I am passionate about algorithmic art and have provided about a dozen workshops over four years on the topic.

https://ckmahoney.github.io/portfolio/posts/livecoding/

thank you for reading.

May the flow of Spices be with you :) naltroc

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43267541

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

For example, I tend to think of "composition" and "synthesis" as two very different topics.

One VST could spit out chords or melodies (not a common VST) whereas another could render those sounds (very common VST)

Story Jam lets you design chord progressions without needing to know about music theory, instead offering intuitive terms like "lightness", "darkness", "drifting" and "roaming". They mean about what you think they mean.

https://storyjam.tenpens.ink

I'm planning a "Show HN" post for tomorrow morning EST with more details. But you can get the sneak peek here :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwIsvKpEgOA

This premise is false. I have made plenty of money busking on the street, for example. Or selling audio recordings at shows.

> {o be clear, artists absolutely have a right to benefit from reproduction of their recordings.

This is correct. Artists benefit when you pay them for the right to reproduce. When you don't (like what you are doing), you get sued. Here's a YouTube video covering 9 examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIVSt8Y1zeQ

> I just don't think anyone should have rights to the knowledge built into those creations since in most cases it wasn't theirs to begin with

What?

Good point about the savings. I was using uncompressed format as the reference, but it is indeed unlikely that YouTube serves out lossless audio.

I also should have used the word "delivery" instead of data storage. Those are two separate problems: where the original asset is stored (and how, if they don't store raw originals), and also how the asset is delivered over the web.

While this does retain the majority of useful information, it explains why the youtube version of your song feels just a little more 'lifeless' than the high quality version you have elsewhere.

The original recording contains high frequency detail that got lost. Your human body uses that high frequency detail to orient itself in space with respect to sound sources (like reverb, reflections, or ambient sounds).

It is interesting from a data storage point of view because this could result in massive savings. Consider audio is recorded at 44.1khz or 48kHz but is actually stored at 32kHz. They have effectively saved 25% in audio file storage at marginal customer experience.

subtractive synthesis isn't synthesis. It's a transformation.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42289042

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

https://localaliennetworknice.bandcamp.com

Can this line of code be always running? What if the app launches itself as a background process?

For a feature I just learned about so many questions, but it's Apple in their store so hedges betting it isn't as dangerous as it sounds. But perks your ears up

Somewhat related comparison, Is a human choosing to do this theft really better than a neural network scraping content for its own purposes?

That's why it sounds weird, because both of the new tones will almost never be harmonically related to the input signal.