Runnin' with the Sympathy for the Meat Puppet the Beatles

October 7, 2014 10:10 AM

~tildemash is a dada mashup generator that grabs isolated vox and instrument tracks out of youtube's hat to create random sonic soup, courtesy of waxy's brain.
posted by cortex (24 comments total)

if they all started playing at the same time this would be cool, I think my mac hates art
posted by wheelieman at 10:16 AM on October 7, 2014

Holy crap - first time out of the gate it gave me - RJ Dio singing Rainbow in the Dark to the lead guitar of Pearl Jam's Jeremy, the bass to Ramble On, and the drums to Whole Lotta Love - and strangely it actually worked really well!
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 10:16 AM on October 7, 2014

if they all started playing at the same time this would be cool, I think my mac hates art

I think they do more or less start at the same time; the issue is more that on isolated tracks, the actual content of the track may not start until a while in. A vox track off a song with an instrumental intro might not start for ten or twenty seconds if the uploader kept the full-length track intact, etc.
posted by cortex at 10:20 AM on October 7, 2014

I got the vocals from The Doors' "Break on Through" over guitars from Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird," and it sounded like the worst high school Battle Of The Bands ever. *shudder*

Cool trick, though!
posted by wenestvedt at 10:23 AM on October 7, 2014 [3 favorites]

My wife has the disconcerting ability and proclivity to sing a completely different song from whatever's playing in the car. That's what this reminds me of.
posted by Foosnark at 10:27 AM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'd enjoy it more if it was less insistent on giving me everlong in each mix.
posted by Ferreous at 10:39 AM on October 7, 2014

foos, my partner does this as well ?:( drives me up the wall!

So, next version will control by BPM, right?
posted by rebent at 10:54 AM on October 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

Reminds me of my favourite Beatles album: Two Virgins & Electronic Music & The Family Way & Sentimental Journey all played simultaneously.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:05 AM on October 7, 2014

You're at your favorite club.

Your regular DJ has taken the night off.

The owners friend is taking over the DJ booth.

He's not actually a DJ.

He's on more drugs than he normally is.

He's convinced he's a genius.

The club becomes refuge to a few lonely souls that are on more drugs than the stand-in DJ.

They still think he's awful.
posted by el io at 11:08 AM on October 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

they did the mash
they did the ~tildemash
the ~tildemash
it was a keyboard smash
posted by capricorn at 11:13 AM on October 7, 2014 [4 favorites]

This brings back visceral memories of walking through Guitar Center on a busy Saturday afternoon.
posted by onehalfjunco at 11:45 AM on October 7, 2014 [6 favorites]

In 2005, after I concussed myself in a roller blading accident and knocked out a tooth and woke up a half mile away with a half hour missing from my memory, I felt like my personality had changed irrevocably in a small way that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

I think that just happened again after six or seven refreshes of tilde mash.
posted by Kwine at 12:28 PM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

The save and share link is good for spreading your particularly horrible ones amongst your coworkers and enemies (but I repeat myself)
posted by DigDoug at 12:44 PM on October 7, 2014

This Sabbath/Beatles/Lennon instrumental is actually weirdly great as some sort of weird stoner jam, though you have to click on the Queen vox to mute them because they ruin the vibe.
posted by cortex at 1:08 PM on October 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

I should take my luck over to a progressive slot machine. I got

Drums: the Beatles, "A Day in the Life"
Guitar: the Beatles, "And Your Bird Can Sing"
Piano: Paul McCartney, "Maybe I'm Amazed"

...and Lindsey Buckingham's vocals from "Go Your Own Way." So close!
posted by Iridic at 1:21 PM on October 7, 2014

I was delighted to see this exchange on Twitter between the creator & Eric Kleptone.
posted by knile at 1:59 PM on October 7, 2014

Goddammit, this is fucking awesome, and yet another thing that I don't have anything to contribute to.
posted by OmieWise at 5:42 PM on October 7, 2014

This is "I am sitting in a room" for Web 2.x.
posted by OmieWise at 5:42 PM on October 7, 2014

Not quite as elegant as the Miles Davis / LCD soundsystems mashup but way more fun!
posted by TwoWordReview at 6:19 PM on October 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

2 things (but a lot more work to do - so not sure it'd be worth it for waxy (or anyone else))

1) bpm matching (within x% of bpm to match - or find a way to change playback speed and adjust to match - though I'm not sure that's possible w/youtube vids?)

2) Implement a "copyright infringement notification notification" so the videos that he receives are like a 404 and won't load and he can replace them with something else.

(Hmm - go your own way, every breath you take, babo o'riley and barracuda - now... this one is... interesting... reminds me of the time we'd take shrooms and "dj" by spinning completely incompatible tracks on the turntables and just trip balls laughing at what we'd come up with LOL)
posted by symbioid at 9:03 PM on October 7, 2014

Oh - and figuring out how to auto-adjust the levels of each "track" so it's cohesive and balanced.

GET ON IT! LOL...
(whole lotta love drums + rock the casbah bass... interesting)
posted by symbioid at 9:06 PM on October 7, 2014

I'm really disturbed - I watched the Beat It video, along with Eddie's Guitar Solo for that Isolated earlier tonight and also the Clapton isolated guitar track around the same time, and now I get beat it, panama and while my guitar gently weeps and the entire universe is a single cosmic entity man.
posted by symbioid at 9:10 PM on October 7, 2014

Yeah, I really love this -- perhaps to an unhealthy degree. Surely the boss will understand if I trip out to mashed-up isolated tracks until COB.
posted by mean square error at 7:27 AM on October 8, 2014

1) bpm matching (within x% of bpm to match - or find a way to change playback speed and adjust to match - though I'm not sure that's possible w/youtube vids?)

I don't know if there'd be any sane way to adjust bpm via youtube itself; more doable but less flexible would be to just hand/machine index a bunch of existing isolated tracks/stems by bpm and then, yeah, only pull out subsets that are on the same bpm when putting a set together. But that'd need a lot more source tracks to keep it actually varied.

I've thought about doing this sort of thing myself in a more hardcore fashion by actually slurping down a ton of tracks, using Echo Nest Remix to analyze bpm and likely key of each, and then stick that all in a little db and use that to mash random tracks together by pitch- and tempo-shifting the tracks into the same speed and register. But that's a much bigger job, and I think the delight in tildemash is partly in what a simple, lightweight smattering of JS it is.

Going through and hand-indexing the needed gain adjustment for each track would be a possible, not overly tedious thing to do, probably, if tildemash is (as I'm guessing) using a pre-approved list of tracks: just ballpark it for each track as a single point of metadata and put that in a table somewhere and set the volume on each youtube widget at load time. But even that has limitations; you can't really turn the gain up on a youtube video past -0db like you could on a mixing board, so you'd have to turn everything else down to the level of the quietest track.
posted by cortex at 7:33 AM on October 8, 2014