James Galvin

As a long-suffering ISDNer, I have always been paranoid about my background bandwidth usage. I passionately hated SETI@HOME, RealPlayer, Quicktime, and all those other programs that went looking for updates without asking. When your maximum rate in a multiplayer game is 7200, every .2k/s counts. I have finally decided that Last.fm is worth it.

Was disappointed to see XMMS struggling and crashing not long after installing the plugin, but it made me realise that Beep is the superior media player, so I’m using that now and it seems much better overall. I’ll keep XMMS plugin-free for whenever I need to secretly listen to some Dana. My account is here, I added a graph on the side there. I’m looking forward seeing what it recommends me… just a shame I haven’t got the bandwidth to listen

I posted a few days ago about some of the projects that I found interesting at the UCC Open Day for Computer Science fourth year projects. The one which I expected to see more of in the future was Mark O’Brien’s project on the algorithmic composition of music. He has sent on some midi files that were automatically composed at the touch of a button (and maybe a couple of slider bars) by his program.

The interface also has a “risk” slider which, if set to “low”, would come out with a tune that conforms perfectly to our rules of music, akin to Mary Had a Little Lamb. Increasing the risk will allow the computer to stray more from the predefined rules to create either a unique inspirational work, or an absolute disaster. Take a listen to this Shins-esque one (which I think had risk factor set to “medium”)… I think its class:

If you’re not into the sinister bells genre, there are pianos, guitars and more on the zip file here (3kb). Mark says he’s currently accepting donations