[CM] SchemeMosaic 1.7

[David O'Toole]

Greetings, fellow computer music enthusiasts!

I'm pleased to announce the 1.7 release of my free musical concatenative
synthesis, remixing, and beat-jamming machine known as SchemeMosaic, with a
number of new features and improvements. SchemeMosaic is implemented partly
in Emacs Lisp and partly in S7 Scheme, and uses the Snd editor to do its
processing while GNU Emacs handles the user interface (and other things
besides.)

Recently while perusing the CMU AI Archive, I found a public domain neural
network simulator written in Scheme. With a few changes it works great in
S7 and I have successfully used it to train several interesting neural
networks that are now included with SchemeMosaic, along with tools to
generate your own networks (not yet documented, but soon.)

Improvements in SchemeMosaic 1.7 include:

  - Increased resolution in spectral analysis.

  - Percussion-3, a neural network (NN) which attempts to classify a sound
as a kick, snare, or cymbal.

  - X-1 through X-6, NN rhythm generators trained on different sets of hip
hop and dance loops (using the Percussion-3 net to detect the beats.) In
the Neural Network Jam Wizard, you can choose a variety of parameters for
beat generation and use the Looper to save your experimentations for
further chopping and screwing in the Chopper Wizard, or for use with
external programs.

  - Beatbox-3, (experimental) which can attempt to resynthesize beatboxing
(mouth drumming sounds) into quantized drum events using WAV samples of
your choice. You can choose the quantization factor and even resynthesize
using Mosaic databases (not included with the main distribution.)

 - More "Wizards", i.e. custom screens to help with common tasks.

  - The Beat Slicer wizard can detect beats and slice them to individual
files for use with the Neural Network Jam Wizard, or other software such as
Hydrogen or LMMS. (I'm planning a drumkit exporter that will work with
both.) It can also speed up and slow down loops without altering the pitch,
although in some cases this does result in distortion. It works better on
some loops than others.

 - Snd can run on a different machine (or in the cloud!) via TRAMP. This is
experimental and not 100% of everything works remotely yet.

 - Bugfixes.

Much more to come!

Check out the newest demo video of SchemeMosaic:

 - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW9OhtNc5LA
 - Xelf.me: http://xelf.me/scheme-mosaic-beatbox-demo.mkv

I would like to invite other Snd enthusiasts to give it a shot! It should
work easily on GNU/Linux based systems, but at present the Windows version
is a work in progress and there might be issues. I'm working with a Windows
user to iron out the bugs and will update the site as things happen. There
is also a Mac OSX version in the works.

As always, the project home page is:

 - http://xelf.me/scheme-mosaic.html

You can chat with myself and some other folks interested in Emacs and Lisp
in audio and music, on Freenode IRC's #emsig channel.

I've also compiled a bunch of sounds from the last year's worth of
experimentation with SchemeMosaic. It's in roughly chronological order and
runs nearly an hour in length. Here is the MP3 file:
http://xelf.me/omnibus-3.mp3 The new neural network stuff is all at the end.

I hope you've enjoyed my update, and I hope you enjoy the sounds.

Thanks again to Bill Schottstaedt and the Snd community for a wonderful
system :) I've never had so much fun programming. Sometimes I shake the
walls of my house with Snd, and I just giggle. You could call it sound
therapy.

--David
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