Music-As-A-Service

Sorry my brain initially skipped the part where you said it was streamed from the internet, I was thinking that there would be a local player application. Personally I am dead set against anything that has an internet connection as a requirement!

Been thinking along very similar lines lately, more likely as an art installation piece (at least initially.) Know a few people who have done similar but personally never been overly impressed and has generally been abstract sounds, rather than really anything that could be called music.

Here’s an investigation I stumbled across in basically this area: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/nc81/infno.html

Not done in Renoise, of course, and the results are of questionable musicality (not to mention the production…), but at least it’s in the right ballpark. As such, I thought it might be of interest to this thread.

The demos are varied enough that it is fairly impressive that they came from the same algorithm.

I also like the comfortably-predictable-but-still-entertaining variation. I’d love to see that with artist / expert input taken into account by the algorithm (not hard-coded, but contributed as intelligence inputs) to e.g. ensure those corny-sounding snare patterns are filtered out, that the instruments sound modern, and that the mix sounds clean.

Generative music in it’s purest form itself seems questionable from the point of view of artist contribution input.
Here’s how I think the idea could work.
Suppose you write a song and all of the sounds are spot on, exactly what you want and it’s a good song that stands on it’s own two feet.
You take that song and change the effects en masse to some other extreme that also sounds great and as different as you like.
You provide the user with some means to modulate between the two for their choice of effects etc.
You purposely avoid creating a situation where the overall mix suffers from frequency clashes etc… You do this by linking the modulation of components that are likely to clash together so that their relative levels remain favourable between point A and point B.
If you could also morph some midi effects, note delay, autoscaling features.
You provide the user with a nice system to interact with, maybe 4 XY pads, a couple of buttons; you could use duplex in renoise for example, along with some clever hydra mapping to realise such a song. And you provide the user with no information on what is changing! hmmm… It would be good if there were a reliable inertial slider.
The skill of the artist comes from the song structure, mood etc, but also from creating a system where all components still fit together nicely as the user fucks around with them.

Edit: So I guess exactly what marty has outlined above… sorry marty :(