Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

mm_kos 4 days ago 16 commentsRead Article on blog.stackdump.com

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Slow_Hand•about 2 hours ago

I see so many people try to reinvent sequencing as a circular diagram, as opposed to (say) a piano roll that loops, and I see little to no advantage to it. It's a cool novelty, but not the type of thing you'd like to work on.

Horizontal (left-to-right) sequencer displays like a piano roll or step sequencer are far more compact to display and easier to read. For drums parts, it's one dimensional until you add a second layer, and then the parts stack vertically, nicely on top of each other.

It's all to say that I don't really see much advantage in this petri nets paradigm. Even the trigger conditions and probabilities have already been incorporated into a large number of DAWs and hardware sequencers. This feels a little like someone who has discovered fire independently from the rest of civilization, but in this day and age I don't think that counts for much when all they had to do was observe the design paradigms that already exist.

In the end, the proof is in the pudding: How good is the music made with the tool? Does the technique allow us to more easily do something that was previously difficult or tedious? In this case, I'm not yet seeing it.

kennywinker•16 minutes ago

The only flaw i see in your reasoning is trying to optimize a creative process. Piano rolls may be technically better, but since the majority of music is made with a piano roll you can use other types of interfaces to break out of the mental ruts a piano roll creates in your thinking. Music making isn't about best - it’s about creativity and inspiration and lateral thinking.

jrajav•about 1 hour ago

I make beats with Patterning on iPad all the time. It's a fantastic sequencing surface. The main advantage over a traditional horizontal sequencer is that time at the measure level is represented much more naturally (as a loop), which makes polyrhythms and track offsets (both common when putting together more interesting sounding, swung beats) easier to visualize and manipulate with confidence. It's also arguably a bit easier to visually reason about symmetry / 'rhyming' across beats, when making step changes - a much more minor improvement but noticeable to me (I'm highly visual).

m_kos•35 minutes ago

I enjoy Patterning too. One limitation of that representation is that it doesn't seem to lend itself to working with loops that evolve over time. I don't know if it could be accomplished by some isometric view of stacked wheels (patterns) or a slinky, but maybe a Petri Net?

tessierashpool•about 1 hour ago

> In the end, the proof is in the pudding: How good is the music made with the tool?

hating on OP for being AI slop is fully legit imo (sorry OP) but don't judge the concept on this example. the rotary sequencer model's actually quite effective. there's lots of niche software and Eurorack modules which implement it, e.g., Moskwa (and Moskwa II) from Xaoc Devices.

here's a YouTube video which shows Moskwa II in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-6n_E9WIfQ

btw the first rotary sequencer was probably Raymond Scott's Circle Machine from 1958:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110927232227/http://raymondsco...

jarth9•about 2 hours ago

Compared to other ways of writing down musical rhythm, I've found this to be a very nice balance of simplicity and expressiveness. Standard notation and drum sequencers have a lot of ambiguity (at least to my non-expert ear) when it comes to swing, microtiming, groove, and the other little things that we think of that make a rhythm attractive. Godfried T. Toussaint has given this idea a full academic exploration. He calls these Petri nets "necklaces", a term borrowed from combinatorics.

tleb_•about 2 hours ago

Can you clarify how this better helps express swing compared to a piano roll?

TheOtherHobbes•about 1 hour ago

You're not sequencing notes you're sequencing multiple parallel levels of musical information which are eventually rendered as notes.

One of those levels could be context-related microtiming - the context being position in the bar, or the actual shape of the phrase, the position in the phrase, and so on.

This isn't sequencing in the classical sense, it's generative composition.

It's not popular because it's much more abstract and harder to work with than "Play this pattern."

There's a lot of unexplored potential in deterministic systems that work with music at these more abstract levels.

tleb_•about 2 hours ago

So this is about visualisation more than different behaviour? There are still N static notes with a cursor moving from start to end, looping over. It's not clear from the blog. Still, I always enjoy experiments in that domain, thanks

tlarkworthy•about 2 hours ago

Oh thats great and makes so much sense and you can see how it could be extended, brilliant abstraction

fwip•about 2 hours ago

What's the value of modeling these as petri nets instead of a regular sequencer? I was expecting some sort of branching, or at least multiple tokens per ring, but I can't figure out how to set that up.

Also - is it just me, or is delivery weirdly off-beat sometimes? Like, isolating to just the kick drums in a standard 4-on-the-floor techno song, it has almost a disorienting amount of delay on some of the beats.

ericwood•9 minutes ago

Browsers intentionally add jitter to timing methods like setTimeout and setInterval to avoid fingerprinting and other side channel style attacks. When I've messed with building in-browser sequencers in the past you had to use a webworker with the clock that sends messages back to the main event loop, although I'm sure there's reasons that won't work these days either.

m_kos•29 minutes ago

> is it just me, or is delivery weirdly off-beat sometimes?

I played with it for a while and implementation is perhaps not the strongest aspect of this project.

embedding-shape•about 2 hours ago

> Also - is it just me, or is delivery weirdly off-beat sometimes?

Is just browser jank I think, with JS in browsers it is infamously hard to get the timing right and consistent, sequencing make this painfully obvious.

ghurtado•about 1 hour ago

The fact that it's the job of the browser to mix the channels in real time is a huge design flaw.

Everyone else does this on the server and then sends you the results.

If my computer is going to do all the work, then I want all the knobs and sliders too.

fwip•about 1 hour ago

Gotcha, that makes sense. The LLM-written article said something about a "humanize" setting, so I thought it could have been something about that, so I spent a while looking for such a setting to disable.