Redone Music

[Doug R.]

Mr. Satrap gave me an idea:

What if instruments produced ascii characters? Different instruments could produce different ranges of patterns. Combining different "notes" from the same or different instruments would create a visual depiction of what the characters were supposed to be hearing. We could actually have compositions and ensembles, and aesthetics could actually be judged and universally experienced!

Here's a rather extreme example of what I'm proposing:
http://forum.cantr.org/viewtopic.php?t=950&start=676

I don't think that the music would produce images that specific, but, then again, maybe they could if the composer was creative enough.

[Dudel]

1: What EXACTLY am I to see in that "image" anyway? All I see is a bunch of squares!
2: If it requires a download of some type, SOME OF US have limited possibilities in that manner.
3: I'm unsure of what you mean exactly, as the aforementioned reasons why.

[Piscator]

Are you serious about 1)?


The idea is at least interesting. Making music would thus require at least some talent. Even though no musical one.

[Dudel]

Why would I joke about that piscator?

Well that would sorta restrict the music players, wouldn't it?

[BlueNine]

Oh lawd, if i have to put up with some idiot newspawn spamming ascii pics that big i'm gonna have to start a whole mess of murderer chars...

[Piscator]

Why would I joke about that piscator?

Well that would sorta restrict the music players, wouldn't it?

Because I can hardly imagine you're not seeing the picture.

And yes.

[Doug R.]

Dudel - it's a human form with arms outstretched.

BlueNine - I'm envisioning less large, maybe 1/3 the size, with each line centered on the page so it's not so obnoxious.

[Dudel]

Few Things:

1) its a BUNCH of squares! [] There IS NO IMAGE there!

2) Because I can't see whats about, I say "no".

3) I'm with Nile, it would get rather annoying.

[SekoETC]

Rarer encodings tend to cause issues. With graphical elements that don't even follow the logics of a language it would be difficult to know if you've found the right encoding if your computer won't auto-detect it.

[joo]

I'm not sure I like this idea... it would kind of take away from the freedom of being able to RP playing in any style one wants.

[*Wiro]

Stupid.

And Cantr can't even properly display Polish, Swedish and German text, it's a bug that just keeps popping up and disappearing.

[Gran]

I one thought about if when someone plays an instrument, a link to a partiture or soundfile to display what he played should show up. It sure would be nice to have an interface to combine notes and make almost music like noise, but it feels also kind of heavy to the alredy cluttered development of features of the game in our current state.

[Cogliostro]

If you look more into what that ascii guy is doing, for him it is already music. Since music is just non-speech sound patterns, designed to give the listener a chance at aesthetic appreciation. The ascii chars are pretty much the same thing, but transposed into the Cantr world. He roleplays generating "impressions" by singing unusual sounds.

Who's to say that the non-speech sounds made by Cantrians shouldn't or can't make up aesthetic patterns on their own, just because that's not quite how it happens in our world? I mean, the idea is pretty scarily similar.

About the spam potential, I think spam is spam, doesn't matter what the contents are, random texts, profanities, or images. It's all spam if it's completely out of context of the game and stupid.

All in all, it'd be awesome if musical instruments each had their own unique "voice"/flavour, maybe not as pictures like that, but even just on a single line spiced with these ascii's, so that when you play a drum, it appears on everyone's screen nice and bossy, with blocky bold chars. And a violin, maybe, would be something with lots of fancy curlies. Maybe.

BTW I tried making some ascii's in Cantr and it doesn't work like that, mine come out all garbled. Why's that?

[joo]

BTW I tried making some ascii's in Cantr and it doesn't work like that, mine come out all garbled. Why's that?

The person who created the radio image put some effort into choosing characters which all had the same width in the font used for Cantr. That way, it would have been easy to build an image up out of "pixels".

If you just use random characters with different widths, you'll have a harder time making them create a coherent image.

[Doug R.]

Few Things:

1) its a BUNCH of squares! [] There IS NO IMAGE there!

Take a screenshot of what you see and post it here.