S P Hannifin

Movies watched in July 2023

The Tall Man

In this 2012 thriller, a small town suffers from recurring missing child cases. Folks say they are taken by the “tall man.” One day the lead character’s son disappears! Oh no! But, like the film Gone Baby Gone, everything is not as it seems, and “twists” reveal a deeper truth. Unfortunately, I did not find the “twists” or truthful revelations all that interesting, so the movie overall was a bland and boring one for me. Gone Baby Gone was much more interesting.

Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms

A 2018 anime film about a woman named Maquia who is from a race of elf-like beings who never age, or at least age very slowly. After her homeland is invaded, she escapes and adopts an orphaned child who ages normally. Hilarity ensues. Actually, not much of anything ensues. The child has very little personality, so the film plods along without much of interest happening. The film did have a nice musical score, however.

Kiki’s Delivery Service

A popular 1989 anime film from Studio Ghibli, one of their few films I hadn’t yet seen. This was another I wanted to see before the Joe Hisaishi concert I attended last month, which was fantastic! As for this film, I also really enjoyed it. It’s episodic and feels a bit slice-of-life at times, so it could easily put you to sleep if you’re tired, but if you’re alert and focused, it’s definitely one of their better films, especially near the end when Kiki fears losing her powers. I think anyone who’s struggled with creativity or learning a new skill (e.g. the dreaded “plateau”) can relate to that sort of pit of self-doubt. And of course Hisaishi’s score is instantly memorable.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

2017 comedy revisiting Jumanji. Been meaning to watch this for a while as I have it on Blu-ray 3D. (Got the sequel too, need to watch that at some point.) I thought this would be a complete reboot, but it’s more of a reboot-sequel as it doesn’t overwrite the previous film with Robin Williams; the Jumanji board game just magically turns itself into a video game to lure a new generation. When powered on, it sucks in its unfortunate victims into its jungle world and makes them play a real-life adventure there. So I guess it’s a bit of an isekai sort of thing. Anyway, fun movie overall, Jack Black is especially hilarious as a teen girl trapped in a Jack Black body. The plot itself doesn’t really offer anything new for seasoned viewers, though.

Sound of Freedom

2023 true story action drama of a government agent who leaves the force in an effort to rescue child victims of human trafficking. Overall, the film does a great job given the sad and disturbing subject. Perhaps it’s a little too Hollywood-ish at moments, though, especially in the final act. Such Hollywood flourishes do make the film more engaging, but at the cost of it feeling less a “true story”. Granted, it’s a film, not a documentary, and interested viewers can always look up the facts vs fiction accounts afterward. Press surrounding the film also became oddly political, at least on Twitter, but there’s really nothing political in the film itself. Overall, great film, and good that it can draw some attention to such a sad, disturbing topic.

Insidious: The Red Door

2023 horror film, sequel to the first two Insidious films. The kid from those films is now in college and, through his artwork, is starting to remember disturbing things from the previous films that he and his father had tried to forget through hypnosis. Ultimately he and his father must once again face the demons that tormented them before. Like the previous Insidious films, this is a cheesy ridiculous story that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Having enjoyed the previous films, I enjoyed this one as well. They could definitely keep the series going if they wanted to.

Inheritance

2020 thriller about a woman who, after her father’s death, discovers that her father has been keeping Simon Pegg chained up in a secret underground bunker. As the woman tries to unravel why her father did this and tries to decide whether or not to let the old man go, the audience tries to keep watching because it’s really stupid and boring.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

2023 fantasy adventure based on the popular RPG. A thief escapes from prison and sets out on some other heist job, hoping to reclaim his daughter from an old partner who betrayed him (Hugh Grant). Fun movie overall. The humor was kind of hit or miss for me; some was great, some was groan. I know nothing about the source material, but that didn’t seem a requirement.

One critique might be that, if this world is full of so much magic, why isn’t there even more constant chaos? Or why isn’t everyone a lot more cautious of magic’s potential for harm and trickery? Or, if the magic the main characters use throughout is supposed to be rare in this world, isn’t it just super-convenient that they have access to it? Perhaps that’s overthinking it, but it does feel unbalanced one way or another.

Still, I enjoyed it.

Shipwrecked

A 1990 live-action Disney pirate film about a boy who ventures out on a ship to earn some money, which is overtaken by pirates. A bit similar to Treasure Island, but with a somewhat less adventurous plot. Might’ve enjoyed this if I were younger, but as a very serious and mature adult, this was a bit too cheesy for me.

Nope

2022 film from director Jordan Peele, somewhere between horror and thriller, but not really either. It’s about some siblings that are trying to keep their family business going when a UFO begins appearing over their horse ranch. And then the entire movie is about them… wanting to get a picture of it so they can sell it for money. Such a silly goal hardly makes for an engaging film, even when the siblings find themselves having to battle against the UFO for their lives. Boring, didn’t work for me.

M3GAN

2022 horror film about an AI robot prototype for kids who becomes deadly after becoming over-protective. Although such a premise is cliche, they could’ve done so much more with it than they actually did. They spent way too long setting up the story, and not nearly enough time having the rogue robot terrorizing foolish victims. Ultimately it’s a big letdown.

The Unforgivable

2021 drama about a woman trying to reconnect with her daughter after being let out of prison for murder. It was too slow and brooding for me, and the “twist” revelation at the end was both completely predictable and uninteresting.

There’s Something Wrong with the Children

A 2023 horror film about a couple looking after their neice and nephew (or was it just friends’ kids? I don’t remember). But the children are replaced by imposters after being lured by demons or something to jump to their deaths in a giant hole in the ground. The imposter children then act creepy because it’s a horror movie, and things do downhill from their as the imposters want to make everyone into imposters as well. Needed more humor and for the adult characters to act a lot less dumb and argumentative all the time.

Detroit Rock City

1999 comedy about a group of teenagers who want to see the band KISS in concert, and spend the entire film attempting to get tickets one crazy way or another. Kind of like the hit Christmas classic, Jingle All the Way! Some of it was funny, but some of its humor was too gross or raunchy for me.

Becoming Astrid

2018 biopic about the early life of famous Swedish children’s author Astrid Lindgren. While it was interesting to learn about her early life (which the film presented rather matter-of-factly, as her actions were rarely very prudent), it did not really make for a very engaging film.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Movies watched in June 2023

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts. (Actually, I guess it’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything.) Here are the movies I watched last month.

Glass Onion

Daniel Craig is back as the southern-accented detective in this 2022 Knives Out sequel. While the mystery and its solution were again a bit convoluted (and I think the massive flashback was a bit of a cheat, storytelling-wise), it was overall an enjoyable watch, even better than Knives Out, perhaps because they were all stuck on an island, so it had that sort of classic cozy mystery feel. I think a third film is already in the works. It was also funny to see cameos from Stephen Sondheim (referencing Sweeney Todd) and Angela Lansbury (referencing Murder, She Wrote). (RIP to both.)

Shattered Glass

A 2003 film telling the true story of Stephen Glass, a journalist who was caught making up a bunch of sensationalist stories in the late 90s, when I suppose journalistic integrity was something publishers still actually cared about to some degree. I had never heard of the true story, so this was quite an engaging film. The film reveals the truth from the perspectives of those he’s manipulating, so your aggravation for his behavior builds as his lies are uncovered. Hayden Christensen does a great job portraying someone who just can’t stop lying, and lying more to cover previous lies, and then continuously weeps for mercy and sympathy when people catch on, a real agonizing personality disorder.

Princess Mononoke

Going to see Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi in concert next week, so wanted to rewatch this 1997 animated film mostly for its beautiful musical score. Storywise, not Ghibli’s best, in my opinion. The first half is great, but the second act just tries to do too much, there are just too many battling factions and conflicts going on. Anyway, Joe Hisaishi’s music is some of the finest film music out there.

Bumblebee

The new Transformers movie, Rise of the Beasts, was one of the few films coming out in 3D this summer,1 so I wanted to check out the 2018 Bumblebee first, which is about the yellow alien robot hiding out on earth when other evil alien robots attack his homeworld. And these alien robots can transform into cars for some reason. Not being a Transformers fan, or really understanding the appeal of the franchise at all (because the toys are cool I guess), this film did not really work for me. It does hit all the right story beats for a “lost alien” sort of movie (think E.T. or The Iron Giant), but if you don’t really care about the characters, it all still feels rather flat. I could understand younger audiences enjoying it though.

Dog Gone

This 2023 film is based on the true story of a teenager whose dog ran away in the mountains and he sets out to find him. An innocent family film for people who like dogs, but way too cheesy for me. The father-son relationship conflict also felt really forced.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

And here’s that Transformers movie I mentioned. I was just curious to see it in 3D. I already forgot what it was about. There’s some kind of alien device macguffin in a museum that the alien robots fight over because it’s really powerful somehow, but it’s all a prequel for the Transformers getting stuck on earth, so nothing is really accomplished. It was pretty dull for a non-Transformers fan. But it was in 3D!

Vampire’s Kiss

From 1988, one of Nicolas Cage’s first films in which he plays an over-the-top wacko who thinks he was bitten by a vampire and whose life then spirals out of control. I really just wanted to watch it because it is the source of many Nicolas Cage crazy face memes. I unfortunately didn’t find it particularly funny or interesting.

Hackers

A 1995 thriller about good vigilante hackers battling against an evil businessman hacker. The depiction of hacking and teen computer-savviness is so completely over-the-top ridiculous, it’s agonizing. I prefer WarGames.

Doctor Sleep

Not the Stephen King story, but a film from 2002, also called Close Your Eyes, about a hypnotist who uses his hypnotic skills to solve some silly mystery. It’s really bland and boring, with ridiculously cheap made-for-TV CGI. Terrible.

Murder Mystery 2

A 2023 sequel to Murder Mystery, a Netflix film starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. Like its predecessor, this offers more of a silly light-hearted comedy than a very thoughtful or engaging mystery, but if you go in knowing that, it’s entertaining. Nothing amazing, but some good laughs.

Crater

A 2023 Disney film about a group of kids who live on the moon. After they learn one of them is leaving forever, they steal a moon rover for one last adventure. It was a little cheesy for me, but was a decent family film, and was even free of any of Disney’s modern propaganda crap. Unfortunately Disney yanked it from their streaming platform not long after I watched it, I guess for some Hollywood accounting tax write-off scheme, so who knows if anyone will ever be able to see it ever again. But, hey, that’s what you get with the streaming business model!

Peninsula

A 2020 Korean film, a standalone sequel to the Korean zombie film Train to Busan. This one’s about a group of people who sneak into zombie-infested territory in search of some bags of cash that were left behind. Unfortunately they are captured by non-zombie humans who have been trapped there, and must fight both to escape. Not as good as Train to Busan, but still a fun zombie flick.

Tin and Tina

A 2023 Spanish horror film about an idiot couple who decide to adopt the creepiest kids they can find, because what could possibly go wrong? The kids are portrayed as being “overly-Catholic”, obsessed with religion, but their understanding of Christianity is just stupid, so when it leads them to do horrible things, it’s not really all that compelling storywise, because they’re just so stupid. Really stupid movie. It did have a decent long take near the end though.

Midnight

A 2021 Korean thriller about a deaf woman who witnesses a crime and is chased by the criminal for the remainder of the film. It has some decent moments of suspense, but also features some agonizing cliches, such as turning your back on the bad guy after he passes out. Overall I thought it was an enjoyable thriller, though nothing overly special.

By S P Hannifin, ago

TuneSage progress update 9

Getting closer to launching an initial version of TuneSage. I obviously bit off more than I could chew in creating the front-end. It still lacks a ton of features I’d like, but it’s just taking too long to program. I should’ve started with something much simpler. Oh well, too late now, I’m almost done. Here’s what I have left to do:

Front-end:

  • Delete track button
  • Copy / cut / paste sections
  • Melody / phrase options
  • Edit key signature
  • Ctrl+z undo
  • Export MIDI file
  • Finalize soundfont
  • Finalize icons

Back-end:

  • Use melody / phrase options sent from front-end
  • More training / styles

Overall site:

  • Create user / login
  • Boilerplate terms of service
  • Integrate user subscriptions (decide on a payment collector)
  • Create a landing page
  • Actually incorporate

I might just skip the front-end Ctrl+z stuff for now, because I’m not quite sure how to implement it efficiently and I’m afraid it might be too time consuming. Otherwise, I think I can finish the front-end stuff by the end of next week.

I’m not sure how long the back-end training will take, because it takes of a lot of tedious data formatting and trial and error.

And the final overall site stuff shouldn’t take long. I’ve never integrated a subscription service before, but I’m guessing most payment services make that pretty easy these days.

I’d love to launch before the end of the month. We’ll see how it goes!

By S P Hannifin, ago

1 Second Everyday : January 2023

Hey! Long time, no blog!

I tried doing “1 Second Everyday” back in 2020, but was only able to keep it up for four months. Let’s see how long I’ll be able to keep it going this year.

January was mostly boring and uneventful. Highlights perhaps include finishing reading the Russian classic The Karamazov Brothers (a more appropriate translation of the title than the usual reverse), which I thought was great and hope to post some thoughts on it at some point.

Definitely lots I hope to do this year, but a big problem I’ve been having lately is my bad posture while sitting at the computer. I can barely sit for an hour before I get a terrible sharp pain in the back of my neck. I guess I am hunching over too much. I need to somehow get my monitor higher or something.

Captions:
1 – a new year begins
2 – gym because I ate too many Christmas cookies
3 – dinner for the cats
4 – some hot chocolate at Starbucks
5 – studying some probability
6 – awesome find at Goodwill
7 – cats eating again
8 – watching Krull (it’s boring)
9 – crab is climbing the glass?!
10 – plink plonk!
11 – getting toasty on the vent
12 – watching a scary movie, aahh!
13 – more cats eating
14 – love this music video for Twilight Force’s Sunlight Knight
15 – reading some Karl Popper
16 – ball track + tissue paper = fun!
17 – reading a classic novel
18 – Xandria music video
19 – found at Goodwill
20 – cats in a cabinet
21 – GPT-3 on 1SE
22 – playing with Midjourney
23 – found at Goodwill
24 – new Twilight Force album!
25 – finished reading this!
26 – watching some Vue talks
27 – started reading this
28 – long Kurosawa documentary
29 – new Xandria album!
30 – cat sitting on the bannister
31 – turtle just chillin’

By S P Hannifin, ago

Thoughts on reality, whatever that really is

I recently finished reading The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman.

It’s a short book, only 200 pages, but still felt too long. Too much filler and repetition. You’re perhaps better off watching an interview with the author on YouTube.

The main premise is simple: we don’t see reality as it truly is, but rather as it relates to our evolutionary fitness.

Some obvious examples of our limited perceptions include:

  • We only see certain wavelengths of light; we cannot see infrared or ultraviolet.
  • We only hear a certain range of frequencies of sound.
  • Our sense of smell is very limited, and often comes with instinctual judgments of pleasantness or disgust.
  • We cannot sense oxygen in our lungs; rather, we can only feel the effects of having too little.
  • We experience being surrounded by solid things, yet atoms consist of mostly empty space.
  • Lots of optical illusions clearly trick our visual perceptions.

This means that everything we perceive in the physical world is actually a high-level abstraction of some unperceived foundational reality. A book, for example, only exists in our minds as a concept, a collection of perceptions and sensory experiences. These perceptions correspond to things in physical reality (that we can’t perceive directly), but they don’t actually exist in physical reality.

The book’s author compares the mind-reality relationship to icons on a computer. Using a computer, you manipulate highly abstracted icons, imagining that files have physical spaces and locations. (The word “file” itself is an abstraction to aid the metaphor.) Inside the computer, everything is just 1’s and 0’s passing through transistors. But it would be completely inefficient to try and derive meaning from those long binary strings, so we work with high-level abstractions, colored pixels on a screen that correspond to those 1’s and 0’s. “Files” don’t even really exist in memory; computer memory is just a big collections of ordered 1’s and 0’s. Files don’t exist until some program (like an operating system) makes some determination of how to separate the bits into separate groups, which is ultimately decided by a human mind, which is where all the meanings of those 1’s and 0’s are derived from in the first place.

OK, that’s all well and good, but so what?

Well… I don’t know. The book doesn’t really go into why understanding this might be important. Perhaps it may help you to appreciate the possibilities of other perspectives, I guess? Help you not take your perceptions for granted, or take for granted the meanings you’re imbuing things with yourself? Or appreciate that there’s a ton of reality that you can’t even see? Perhaps it has some applications for AI or something?

Interesting stuff to think about anyway.

The last chapter is the most confusing. The author starts talking about what he calls “conscious realism“, which I can’t claim to understand very well. He writes on page 184:

If we grant that there are conscious experiences, and that there are conscious agents that enjoy and act on experiences, then we can try to construct a scientific theory of consciousness that posits that conscious agents—not objects in spacetime—are fundamental, and that the world consists entirely of conscious agents.

Um… OK?

Actually, I once had a dream in which I understood that reality and spacetime are created collectively by consciousnesses, so I find the idea compelling. On the other hand, I really don’t understand the idea any deeper than that. On some level, it feels like just playing semantic games with “reality” and “consciousness”, which is maybe all one can do.

(If I say “A book exists only in one’s consciousness”, is not such an existence just as valid, perhaps even more valid, than some other sense of existence?)

On page 190, the author goes on to write:

The definition of a conscious agent is just math. The math is not the territory. Just as a mathematical model of weather is not, and cannot create, blizzards and droughts, so also the mathematical model of conscious agents is not, and cannot create, consciousness. So, with this proviso, I offer a bold thesis, the Conscious Agent Thesis: every aspect of consciousness can be modeled by conscious agents.

I still don’t really get it. Also, don’t you still have to answer what consciousness itself is? (And can you?)

So, overall, some interesting ideas, but I’m not quite sure what, if anything, I can do with them.

 

By S P Hannifin, ago

Coming Soon: The Archives

I’ve got quite a few compositions that I’ve never uploaded to streaming services, and I’ve been meaning to for a while now. In fact, I’ve got over 4 hours of tracks unavailable on Spotify and other streaming sites, which over the years has probably cost me some 12 cents or so in lost profits. OK, maybe not that much, but still. So before the end of the year I hope to release “The Archives”, four volumes of my early music. As there are about 4 months left of the year (as of this writing), I’ll probably aim to release one a month.

As most of these tracks have been available to freely download on my outdated MP3s page for a long while now, digital copies of the albums will also be free.

Here’s the current plan in terms of track listings:

The Archives: Volume 1

  1. The Workshop
  2. Hatching of a Dragon
  3. Grandeur
  4. Flight of the Dragon
  5. The Silver Knight
  6. The Aeneid
  7. Canon (Not Really) No 1 in C major
  8. Canon (Not Really) No 2 in C major
  9. March of the Canterbury Tales
  10. Short Piece for Orchestra
  11. Largo for String Quartet in A major
  12. Serenade for Strings No 1
  13. Octet in A minor

The Archives: Volume 2

  1. Journey of a Steed
  2. End of the Road
  3. Knights of the Round Table
  4. Lullaby for Cello and Piano
  5. Short Piece for Strings
  6. Trio for Harp, Flute, and Oboe No 1
  7. Woodwind Quartet in G minor
  8. The Gafradalasha String Quartet: I
  9. The Gafradalasha String Quartet: II
  10. Waltz of the Penguins

The Archives: Volume 3

  1. Waltz of Pegasus
  2. Twilight Fantasia
  3. Dragon of the Mist
  4. The Neuschwanstein Suite: 1. Dance of the Ice Sprites
  5. The Neuschwanstein Suite: 2. Dance of the Woodland Sprites
  6. The Neuschwanstein Suite: 3. Battle and Defeat of the Trolls
  7. The Forgotten Wish
  8. Serenade for Strings No 2
  9. Broken Swords
  10. The Banquet
  11. Trio for Harp, Flute, and Oboe No 2
  12. Hour by Hour

The Archives: Volume 4

  1. Guinevere’s Lullaby
  2. The King’s Assassin
  3. Lullaby for Harp and Whistle
  4. Mozart’s Dream
  5. Trio for Harp, Flute, and Oboe No 3
  6. This is the Pizz
  7. Inside the Android’s Dream
  8. Dance of the Fools
  9. Fairy Music
  10. Lullaby for Harp and Vibraphone
  11. Melody for Harp and Piano
  12. Piano Concerto No 0
  13. It’s a Rondoful Life
  14. Short Piece for 2 Violins
  15. Island of the Dragons

So be on the lookout for these amazing albums collecting your favorite golden oldies on your favorite streaming platforms! Stream them and allow me to make 0.0002 cents each time you listen, which will help me pay for a single M&M every five years.

P.S. There are still a few tracks missing, mainly more experimental and less-melodic works that would likely sound jarring and out of place mixed in with the rest. I may upload these as part of a separate album later.

By S P Hannifin, ago

TuneSage progress update 8

There’s still a lot of work to do, but I think I just might actually be able to launch TuneSage’s MVP this month! I’m done with all the difficult and time-consuming backend algorithmic programming. All that’s left with the backend now is manual training and calibration. That will still take some time, but it’s mostly data entry and testing. I think the melodic styles TuneSage will offer on launch will consist of:

  • Irish / Scottish folk song
  • American folk song
  • Sea Chantey
  • Hannifin (trained from my own compositions)
  • Generic

Of course, I’ll later add more styles, but these are easy to train for, as I can use simple public domain examples as training data, and they’ve already stood the test of time.

Still lots of stuff on the todo list though:

  • Melody generation options GUI on the frontend
  • Overhaul frontend design
  • Finalize soundfont
  • Allow setting track volume1
  • Recreate the landing page / home page
  • Add user account system (register / login / logout)
  • Add some basic terms of service
  • Setup payments system / trial period2
  • Setup some sort of analytics to track usage metrics
  • Register company (officially found it as a company)

So still quite a bit of work, but it’s all very doable, and I know (or am confident I can easily figure out) how to do it.

Then, after launching, I’ll be focused on iterating, iterating, iterating repeatedly, trying to improve the app and get users and feedback!

Stay tuned, I should be able to release some example melodies soon!

By S P Hannifin, ago

DALL-E 2 is awesome! I love it!

Warning: Lots of images below!

Earlier this week, I was finally invited to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 public beta! And I’m completely in love with it. Below are some of my favorite pieces I’ve generated with it by giving it simple text prompts.

First, a few details about the app: Generating these pictures is a computationally intensive process, so they limit how many pictures you can generate. This is done with credits. Upon receiving an invite, they give you 50 free credits to start with. Each credit allows you to send one text prompt, and you get four variations in return. Each month they give you 15 more free credits. However, you can buy credits as well. Currently that price is $15 for 115 credits, which comes to a little over $0.13 per prompt, which really doesn’t sound bad, but it adds up quickly when you get addicted! Still, personally I think it’s totally worth it. Just wish I had more money to spend on it!

Sometimes you get really awesome results, sometimes you get weird abstract nonsense that’s nothing like what you had in mind. So you have to get a feel for what sort of prompts might give you something interesting, and what sort of prompts it won’t understand.

So here’s a little gallery of some of the stuff I’ve created so far. I’ve already spent $30 and it’s only my first week with access, so I will have to restrain myself now. (I still have around 85 credits left.)

Finally, it generates images at a resolution of 1024×1024. I’ve resized the images below in an effort to conserve screen space and bandwidth.

Dolphin eating a cheeseburger

This is similar to a prompt I tried on another AI image generator last year, so I was curious to see how DALL-E would do with the prompt. Much better!

Libraries

My favorite “style” of DALL-E’s output tends to be “oil painting”.

Steampunk owls

Animals wearing headphones

DALL-E tends to draw animals much better than humans, I suppose because they can be a bit more abstract and less structured than a human’s face. (Although note it doesn’t understand that headphones should go on mammals’ ears rather than the sides of their heads, haha.)

Some abstract art

The prompt here was something like “A painting of a giant eye ball sitting in a chair by the fire.”

Portrait of Mozart as various animals

Owls reading books

Painting of Ha Long Bay in Vietnam in the style of Van Gogh

Castles on cliffsides

Starry skies above castles

Flowers growing out of skulls

Money and treasure!

Pirate treasure maps

Skulls on fire

Weaknesses

The above are all cherry-picked examples of some of my favorite outputs so far; some results come out a lot less interesting. DALL-E is particularly not very good with images that require specific structural detail, such as human faces, or pianos, or even dragons. It excels at looser, less-structured forms, such as flowers, trees, and clouds. Below are some examples of output that I was less pleased with, showing some of its weaknesses.

Conclusion

Overall, despite its weaknesses, I’m still completely blown away by the quality of DALL-E’s output. I can’t wait to put some of the images I’ve generated to use as album covers or something! I love it!

By S P Hannifin, ago

TuneSage progress update 7

The time is flying by too quickly! But I am making progress. The backend melody-generating code is working much better now, though it’s actually only writing four-bar phrases at the moment. So I’ll be working on expanding that capability for the rest of the week, as well as expanding its stylistic palette with more training data. (A melody is just a collection of related phrases, so the foundation is already there.) If I’m lucky, I may even be able to share some example output next week.

Frontend-wise, I think the only other feature I need to work on for now is the ability to add, move, and delete tempos, which should only take a couple of hours. The frontend it still needs a design overhaul, though, which will take another day or two.

The frontend will be missing a lot of features on launch, but users should at least be able to generate tunes and export them as MIDI files to open in their favorite DAW or notation program or whatever.

So I think my schedule is close to the same as it was in my last progress update:

  • This week: Finish backend and redesign frontend
  • Next week: Soundfont and user account system, start releasing samples
  • Week 3: Register company, install payment and analytics systems
  • Week 4: Set up trial, front page update, and launch!

If I can actually accomplish that, I could launch as soon as August 15!

But of course that’s probably not going to happen…

Still, we’re getting closer and closer!

By S P Hannifin, ago

TuneSage progress update 6

My goal last week was to “finish backend and overhaul frontend”, which definitely did not happen.

My work on the backend unfortunately came to another dead end. I was trying automate the training of the AI so that I could just give it melodies and it would train on them with little oversight. It worked, but too inefficiently; it must be continually tweaked to work well, so the whole endeavor ends up taking even more time. For now, it seems it will be more efficient time-wise to train it manually. In other words, I think it will be more time-efficient to use supervised learning rather than unsupervised learning. (Which is perhaps an obvious outcome, but it was worth a try.)

So I’m already weeks behind! Schedule now looks like this:

  • This week and next week: Finish backend and overhaul frontend
  • Week 3: Soundfont and user account system, start releasing samples
  • Week 4: Register company, install payment and analyctics systems
  • Week 5: Set up trial, stress testing, front page update, and launch!

Admittedly, it will still likely take longer than that…

Questions about startup idea:

The last startup school webinar was about evaluating your idea for a startup, and included a number of good questions to ask yourself about an idea to help with that. Granted, I’ve already chosen an idea (AI music SaaS), but I thought it still might be interesting to answer the questions:

  1. Does your team have founder / market fit to work on this idea? I don’t really have a team, but yes, as a programmer and a music composer, I think I have good founder / market fit. The product is something I want for myself and would use.
  2. How big is the market for this idea today? I don’t know. There are other AI music services out there, but I don’t know how good their profits are. The market for music software in general, however, is huge.
  3. How big could it be in a few years? Again, I don’t know, but I haven’t seen any indication that it’s growing rapidly at the moment.
  4. What is the problem you hope this product will solve? Have you seen this problem first hand? How are confident are you that it’s actually a problem? For your users, how acute and frequent is the problem? Composing music can be time consuming; there are lots of creative decisions to make. It can also be difficult to get going if you’re just getting started or haven’t done it in a while. Yes, I have experienced this first hand. I know others have this problem as well, as my previous melody generating apps attracted some users. As for how frequent and acute the problem is, I don’t know; I’ll have to talk to more users.
  5. Do you have entrenched competition? If so, how will you beat them? Yes, there are a few competitors in AI music. I need to do some more research on them, but in my opinion, they’re of limited use, particularly because they do not generate interesting melodies. They’re output tends to sound either too random or too bland. My focus on melody may be a good starting point to beat them.
  6. Is this something you personally want and would use? Definitely!
  7. Did this idea only recently become possible, or only recently become necessary? Yes and no. The algorithms would certainly be possible to run on older computers, but they take time to come up with.
    1. If not, why has no one solved it before? The algorithms are not obvious, I suppose, even with popular modern AI paradigms.
  8. What are the proxies – large, successful companies that do something similar to this? I don’t know if there are any. None that I know of, anyway.
  9. Is this a problem that you personally care about? Is it something that you would be willing to work on for a long time? Yes and yes.
  10. Can your solution scale? Could this be a consulting business in disguise? Since it’s an SaaS, yes, scaling is possible.
  11. Is this idea in a good “idea space”? I think? I’m not really sure what the “idea space” for AI music is.
  12. How did you come up with this idea? Did you start with the problem or the solution? Started with the problem. In fact, don’t even have solutions to all the problems yet! But I think the solutions are reachable.
  13. Do you have a new insight about this idea, one that few others have? Yes, I think my approach to generating melodies is a new insight; I don’t see any other service offering decent melody generation at the moment.
  14. What are the current alternatives that people use instead of your product? Why will people switch to your product? How difficult will it be to get them to switch? I admittedly don’t know; I’ll have to talk to users.
  15. How will you make money? SaaS!
  16. If this the kind of business that has a chicken-and-egg problem (i.e., a marketplace, a dating site), how will you solve it? No chicken-egg problem here!
    By S P Hannifin, ago