Music Thing: Scrambled Hackz

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.

[Arnon @ Mar 24th 2006 4:40PM]

Too bad it sounds awful >_

[YooTek @ Mar 24th 2006 4:51PM]

i just watched the video...and i have to agree with #1, it sounds HORRIBLE

[Snoogans @ Mar 24th 2006 5:09PM]

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

[Charles Garcia @ Mar 24th 2006 5:17PM]

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!

[pDK @ Mar 24th 2006 5:26PM]

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

[TheBuzzer @ Mar 24th 2006 5:38PM]

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 :)

[Michael Derby @ Mar 24th 2006 6:09PM]

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.

[Nick @ Mar 24th 2006 6:42PM]

That is absolutely astounding.

[Dj @ Mar 24th 2006 6:56PM]

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

[Saif @ Mar 24th 2006 6:57PM]

PD (Pure Data) rocks!

[Cane @ Mar 24th 2006 7:17PM]

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

[Yoyodyn @ Mar 24th 2006 7:37PM]

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.

[phosfiend @ Mar 24th 2006 7:40PM]

the awsomeness of this is bewildering - i am not %^$*ing worthy.

[Rex @ Mar 24th 2006 8:20PM]

hahaha I just noticed that that was Mc Hammer in his Can't Touch This video :O

[Trib @ Mar 24th 2006 8:50PM]

Absolutely class. Nathan Barley sort of music produced.
I'd love to get my hands on that machine

[Dan @ Mar 25th 2006 4:30AM]

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.

[Phillip @ Mar 25th 2006 9:47AM]

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.

[Khmer @ Mar 27th 2006 2:12AM]

Comment number 7 has the right idea. It's like Nano technology.

[justin @ Apr 25th 2006 11:33AM]

#17- I would buy that CD