Humanizing computer-generated music

[bkidd]

A scientific article came out about a month ago that explores how to better exploit the subtle variations in rhythm give music the human quality. It's an interesting study with implications for improving techniques for audio editing and understanding the neurophysiology of time perception and timing of actions. The information on the paper and abstract appear below.

"The Nature and Perception of Fluctuations in Human Musical Rhythms", Hennig et al.,

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026457

Abstract
Although human musical performances represent one of the most valuable achievements of mankind, the best musicians perform imperfectly. Musical rhythms are not entirely accurate and thus inevitably deviate from the ideal beat pattern. Nevertheless, computer generated perfect beat patterns are frequently devalued by listeners due to a perceived lack of human touch. Professional audio editing software therefore offers a humanizing feature which artificially generates rhythmic fluctuations. However, the built-in humanizing units are essentially random number generators producing only simple uncorrelated fluctuations. Here, for the first time, we establish long-range fluctuations as an inevitable natural companion of both simple and complex human rhythmic performances. Moreover, we demonstrate that listeners strongly prefer long-range correlated fluctuations in musical rhythms. Thus, the favorable fluctuation type for humanizing interbeat intervals coincides with the one generically inherent in human musical performances.

[michi]

That was an interesting read, thanks for that! This partly explains why the humanization feature in Percussion Studio doesn't seem to help all that much. Even with this (random) humanization, things sound sterile (or like someone playing djembe when they are drunk, if you turn it up too high).

To be fair, Percussion Studio sounds sterile for other reasons as well. For one, each note is exactly the same as any other of the same pitch because there is only one sample for each note. And the lack of dynamics doesn't help either.

Michi.