markov chains

Generating More of My Favorite Aphex Twin Track

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“aisatsana” is the final track off Aphex Twin’s 2012 release, Syro. A departure from the synthy dance tunes which make up the majority of Aphex Twin’s catalog, aisatsana is quiet, calm, and perfect for listening to during activities which require concentration. But with a measly running time just shy of five and a half minutes, the track isn’t nearly long enough to sustain a session of reading or coding. Playing the track on repeat isn’t satisfactory; exact repetition becomes monotonous quickly. I wished there were an hour-long version of the track, or even better, some system which could generate an endless performance of the track without repetition. Since I build software for a living, I decided to try creating such a system.

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Alex Bainter

If you’d like to try the experience before you read this whole article (although you should read the article), listen here. I’m sure you’ll agree that it sounds like “more aistsana” without being aistsana.

Spoiler: the secret is Markov chains of musical phrases.

Searching For A Virgin

You just can’t rely on GMail’s “contacts” search any more. Look what it came up with:

Not a result I'd commonly associate with the word "virgin".

With apologies to those of you who won’t “get” this: the person who came up in the search results is a name that is far, far away, in my mind, from the word “virgin”.

In not-completely-unrelated news, I use a program called SwiftKey X on my phone, which uses Markov chains (as I’ve described before) to intelligently suggest word completion and entire words and phrases based on the language I naturally use. I had the software thoroughly parse my text messages, emails, and even this blog to help it learn my language patterns. And recently, while writing a text message to my housemate Paul, it suggested the following sentence as the content of my message:

I am a beautiful person.

I have no idea where it got the idea that that’s something I’m liable to say with any regularity. Except now that it’s appeared on my blog, it will. It’s all gone a little recursive.

Beware: Necrophiliac Paramedics!

A conversation I had this morning with JTA, via text message:

I sent:

Boiler update: this is getting silly. The probability-weighted Markov-chain based predictive text system I’m using this morning saw me type “boi” and suggested “Boiler update:”? /sighs/
On the upside, I’ve successfully arranged for the new distributor valve to be installed on Friday, when I’ll be around.

To give a little background, we’re having trouble with the boiler on Earth. You may have observed that it broke last year, and then again this year: well – it’s still broken, really. Nowadays it’ll only produce a little hot water at a time, and makes a noise like that scene in Titanic where the ship begins to tear in two. You know – a bad noise for a boiler to make. Over the last two or three weeks we’ve repeatedly fought to get it repaired, but it’s been challenging: more on that in a different blog post, if JTA doesn’t get there first.

JTA replied:

On the plus side, at least this saga is overriding your phone’s memory of your previous life as a male prostitute. :-)

I was once mistaken for a gay prostitute, actually – by a gay prostitute – but that’s another story, I guess. In any case, I responded:

Until now! you’ve just mentioned that again, which means it’ll be the “last message received” when the paramedics go through my phone if I’m killed on the way to work this morning. And they’ll say, “yeah; I’d pay to have sex with him.”

Quickly followed by:

And his mate will say:
“Now he’s dead, you don’t HAVE to pay.”
If my corpse is raped by a paramedic, I’m blaming you.

To which JTA said:

You’re talking about people who drive blacked out vans full of drugs. I’m pretty sure they never pay.

From prostitution to necrophilia to date rape over the course of only a handful of text messages. What a great start to a Wednesday morning. I do like the image of an ambulance as “a blacked out van full of drugs,” though…

Dadadodo Poetry

Decided to have Dadadodo, which I used yesterday, to generate some poetry based on my vanity pages from the old version of AvAngel.com, my perpetually-under-redevelopment web site. Take a look at this:

My body, of the religion,
That of seeing myself in a moment,
Stares ahead.
Always been an existential touch,
And I banish this.
My life, without a link, is in my writing,
To her I’m water,
At the rain comes ecstasy:
It’s gone.

Not bad for an algorithm with no pre-programmed understanding of language, I thought. Meaningless… but in a good way…