Music Thing: Scrambled Hackz
By Ryan Block 
posted Mar 24th 2006 4:27PM
posted Mar 24th 2006 4:27PM
Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new
music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:
It's like Karaoke gone
wrong. You sing into the mic, but something very different comes out of the speakers. It's a jerky, warped version of
MC Hammer trying to sing what you sang. Scrambled Hackz is a cobbled together mixture of ordinary hardware and
extraordinary software, running across three programming languages.
Sven König, who designed it, calls it a Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine, and does a great job of explaining the whole system in this video (Also available here on YouTube). First, a source track is chopped into slices, each 1/16th of a beat long. Each slice has it's sound spectrum analysed, and is dropped into a database.
The fun starts when new audio comes into the
system through the microphone. It is similarly sliced up, in real time. Each chunk is compared to the database, which
starts spitting out chunks of the original source track (and it's accompanying video) to match the audio input.
In fact, singing doesn't work that well - the system certainly can't match words intelligibly. But human beatboxing into the mic sounds incredible, turning your boom-ka into kicks and snare drums from the original track. As an interface for a sampler, the human voice is a lot more intuitive than a keyboard and a bunch of knobs.
Sven has used the system (loaded with a ghastly collection of 80s hits) for live performance, and as a hysterical gallery installation. He's planning to release the software, currently a mess of C , Python and Pure Data, under the GNU GPL once he’s cleaned it up.
Sven König, who designed it, calls it a Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine, and does a great job of explaining the whole system in this video (Also available here on YouTube). First, a source track is chopped into slices, each 1/16th of a beat long. Each slice has it's sound spectrum analysed, and is dropped into a database.
In fact, singing doesn't work that well - the system certainly can't match words intelligibly. But human beatboxing into the mic sounds incredible, turning your boom-ka into kicks and snare drums from the original track. As an interface for a sampler, the human voice is a lot more intuitive than a keyboard and a bunch of knobs.
Sven has used the system (loaded with a ghastly collection of 80s hits) for live performance, and as a hysterical gallery installation. He's planning to release the software, currently a mess of C , Python and Pure Data, under the GNU GPL once he’s cleaned it up.
Too bad it sounds awful >_
i just watched the video...and i have to agree with #1, it sounds HORRIBLE
Are you kidding me, that piece of code is amazing; that's one of the most ingenious things I've ever seen.applause to that man
if you are into music like aphex twin and things as such... or into the art music scene this is amazing... I totally love it and would love to get my hands on it for live performances!
I don't think it would sound so bad if someone with a sense of rythem would use it... The very first clip was not so bad. It was the clips of that () douche bag () that made it sound terrible. He was just screaming into the mic and he was awful at making a constant beat-box.
Concept - OK ; Performance - Terrible
They should use this for america idol.
Let them sing the song and see how the image goes.
The closer they are to the real song the closer the flow of the image is :)
I'm not sure the whole potential of this is in view yet. You could feasibly replicate the whole range of a real instrument and make it controllable with your voice. Or, you could create your own instuments. Holy crap. That's all I can say.
That is absolutely astounding.
wow this thing is badass I wonder how it be if this thing was used in mixing. They already have dvj-x1 but with also using this...man the possibilites...ahhah
PD (Pure Data) rocks!
I admit the potential for this product is amazing. Again in the wrong hands it just gives people without talent an excuse to make music.....not much different than now.
But it is ingenous
Friend of mine just had an interesting idea. This software could be used to determine if a song is original or not (given a large enough database of existing songs) All you would need to do is play a song into it, and if there were a sufficiently large enough hits to another song already in the database, then you have a copy cat.
the awsomeness of this is bewildering - i am not %^$*ing worthy.
hahaha I just noticed that that was Mc Hammer in his Can't Touch This video :O
Absolutely class. Nathan Barley sort of music produced.
I'd love to get my hands on that machine
It would be cool to load your entire song library into that and then just try singing a song at random and see what it picks out.
While I agree that the first bit sounded horrendous, if you've listened to any of the newer Electro that's coming out on the market these days (think Modeselektor), it sounds pretty (pardon the pun) analogous. It could also be an amazing new visual tool for them to use. Personally, I really want to get my hands on it, but only if I can use my database of Mr. T quotes, along with the A-Team theme song, to come up with the ultimate in musical goodness.
Comment number 7 has the right idea. It's like Nano technology.
#17- I would buy that CD