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  • This was really cool. I would love to play some Dave Tipper on this to see what it looks like.
  • > This model doesn't shy away from drawing upon all its knowledge. It casually refers to alpha premultiplication and fundamental frequencies in the same breath. It is fond of acronyms.

    Yes - I had Fable tackle some long-standing bugs in some code I had and I quickly lost track of what it was talking about and had to ask a lot of clarifying questions.

    It killed my bugs like they were nothing though. Opus and even GPT5.5 had churned on these same things for ages, but even with my manual help we made no progress.

    It felt like they weren't the slightest bit challenging for Fable. So glad to see it back!

    by nl
  • >The writing is also literary. It draws an analogy between the 12 musical pitch classes and the 12 markings on a clock. Noise lingers. Material surges off the rim.

    I absolutely hate this revolting writing style by LLMs

  • It’s like an angsty book written by a teenager with only a middle-school level understanding of the world: throwing a few completely random words in there to sound smart.

    Hard to believe that something that writes so terribly is so good at mathematics, given that writing non-slop must be at least some part formulaic.

  • I physically cringed at both the quote and the surrounding section. The idea of this project is cool, but the amount of LLM glazing is bizarre.
  • Did you consider some kind of arrangement of the notes that is less "equal-tempered", and that would highlight the harmonic relationship between the notes? probably would need to be key-specific.. or maybe rather now would you that fable is back?
  • That generated video was eye opening for me. I've been using Opus in Claude Code for studying and at work, but it never occurred to me to use 3b1b's excellent python library for generating maths visualisations to let it generate such good graphical demonstrations.
  • This is amazing.

    One of the weaknesses of the video is that there are artifacts in the narration of passing through a text layer. "Bass" is pronounced as the fish at one point. "Wound" is pronounced as the injury. It's clear that these are homonyms of what was actually intended by the script.

  • Those are the things that can be most clearly pointed out but the (wrong) meaning is also constantly asserted by the TTS voice using the wrong inflection, intonation, and emphasis.

    It honestly makes my ears bleed. To me, it sounds like an extremely unintelligent person reading a teleprompter. Absolutely nothing going on between the ears.

  • Kinda interesting how its just like a FFT chart in a circle but perhaps the author is not aware that is the case. Would be curious to know what things were "implmentation details" for the fancy AI and what wasn't.

    I could be wrong but milkdrop already would do light FFT analysis for effects right?

  • I'm also curious about the implementation details, the result is visually beautiful, but the code could be interesting too, at least as a 'Fable hystorical artifact'. Is it visible on github?
    by _jx
  • I suggest you watch the explainer video the ai made, its pretty awesome, but yeah, thats exactly what it is, with some depth to how exactly it uses FFT, and solving some problems with getting good resolution on different frequencies
  • Pretty sure the author is aware. I think the interesting part is that the frequency is logarithmic and one rotation = 2x. This means you can make musical observations about chord qualities from the plot. That's not generally true for FFT plots.
  • I may have been overselling the AI's initiative in the article -- it still required a fair bit of steering. I put most of the prompts involved here: https://saltblock.neynt.ca/waveloop-prompts.md

    Wrapping FFT in a log2(freq) % 1 spiral was part of the human direction :)

  • My Fable example is not nearly as cool but still (to me) impressive.

    Last year, I would occasionally test the latest models by vibe-coding in-browser music generators using only HTML, CSS, and JS. Here’s one made in July by Gemini:

    https://gally.net/temp/20250701synthesizer-gemini2/index.htm...

    And one made in September by Claude:

    https://gally.net/temp/20250917rhythmdrone/index.html

    With Fable, I was able to one-shot something much more sophisticated:

    https://gally.net/temp/20260610-fable-synthesizer/index.html

    It’s still a long way from creating music I would want to listen to, though.

  • These are lovely. That the Fable one is one-shot is shocking.
  • I love these kind of things - we forget so quickly how much these have improved.
    by nl
  • That was my experience with Fable as well. Pulled my extremely complex project that I could squint and see was possible, but actually put mathematical concreteness to things in a way I could only intuit.

    On the flip side, visualizers have always fascinated me. I love this one, but one build off I've always wanted to see: analyze the entire file a priori, and then generate the visuals. Sort of like a normalization pass, but getting longer form structures decoded ahead of time could be pretty neat.

  • The video game Audiosurf[1] did this, as it has to generate the game track ahead of time so that it would be playable!

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiosurf

    by carb
  • I've been planning exactly what you describe in that second paragraph for creating videos for the music I make. It's a lot easier than doing it realtime, and because I make the music, I'm planning on doing it multi-track so I can put individual stems in.
  • Im building some music playback software and am currently struggling with the implementation of a spectrum analyzer to visualize the music.

    This is incredible stuff and I learned a lot. Well done sir.

    Ps, also mourning the loss of Fable! It sorted out a 3 month bug hunt odyssey in 3 days. For a somewhat novel problem in a pretty niche area (DSD DoP audio crackle problems during certain playback edge cases).

  • Fable was quite relentless, it was fun watching it work. I described my lisp interpreter project's short term plans and long term roadmap, Fable thought for like 20 minutes then just told me it was all "inevitable" and started working on the stuff. Ever since then I started to picture Fable as some kind of Terminator.

    Left me that code and a massive code review that unfortunately didn't contain any of the I/O and memory safety hardening I wanted. I haven't fully reviewed the code yet. I get a little sad when I read it. Not a US citizen so I'm not sure I'll ever get to use a state of the art model again.

  • I was not expecting the part where Fable produces a passable 3Blue1Brown-style explainer video of the algorithms it just implemented that sounds like it's narrated by a character from Dora the Explorer.

    What a strange era we now live in.

  • You mean what a strange era an opaque set of administration-approved companies live in...
  • Relevant YouTube video about content farming channels creating AI generated math explainers.

    https://youtu.be/mRO_QonhC2c

  • I actually had no idea Fable is able to generate videos from scratch like that. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. But it never occurred to me.
  • > As we all know, the foundation of Western diatonic music theory is ¹²√2, the ratio between the frequencies of successive semitones.

    Nods knowingly. Yes, of course. I definitely know this.

  • > I ignore other temperaments; they are all close enough to 12-TET.

    As any reasonable person would.

  • I had the same lack, so I walked myself through it from the very start: https://brianberns.github.io/01-SineWaves.html
  • In a nutshell:

    An octave (for example from a C to the next C) is a doubling in frequency. In the Western diatonic system, there are 12 notes per octave. (C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B). Notes are "evenly spaced" within the octave - every note has the same ratio between its frequency and the frequency of the next note. Hence, that ratio is ¹²√2