Recording robots drumming
or Sadie Robkins Dance
31 Jul 2022 - atrodo - Song: Sadie Hawkins Dance by Relient K
A few months ago, I was explaining that I was wanting to start uploading files again. I was looking to start soon, but that soon became a few weeks and a few weeks became a few months as caution and trepidation meant that I was hesitant to pull the trigger and start uploading.
The trouble I found myself in is that I wanted two things at the same time: both that the music to sound good as well as start getting things out there. There are the two forces competing in this process. The end goal of all of this is for the robots to be creating music that people will want to stay and listen to. But to get there, I need to start getting the music out there so I can actually evaluate what they produce, and not look at it from a data standpoint.
So at the beginning of July I finally pulled the trigger and started to publish music again. While the first batch was generated before July, the summer was full of activities that put me in a position where I didn’t want to publish while being away. And more than that, I as just plain hesitant to, trapped in the question of what the best path forward actually was. For the first week, I set the robots to publish every day. After the first week, I decided to reset it so that there is a new published video every other day, and for the time being, I think that’s what I am going to leave it as.
In the immediate future, I need to sit again to listen and take notes, then I have basically two paths for improvements. The first path is to fix the melody extraction process, while the second is to make the music created by the robots better with the existing melodies and process as they are now. While it would exceedingly satisfying and interesting to work on improving the melodies, the melodies I have now are not completely broken. In the cases I’ve heard so far, the melodies themselves are at times nonsensical or don’t have great rhythm, but overall they are, I believe at this point, workable.
But the biggest reasons to work on making the robots sound better with the melodies I have now is the scope of work. There is a lot of work to be done to fix the melodies, and a lot of moving parts that have to be kept in my head at once. Fixing what they sound like with what is there has more but smaller components I can work on in sequence. Each of these components individually hopefully will make the whole thing more entertaining. Not that I won’t tackle the melodies, I’m sure I will, but this is the better elephant to eat first. And how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, although, I would assume it’d go rotten before you can finish the elephant.