Endless Jingling
December 15, 2014 7:20 AM   Subscribe

Endless Jingling
Endless Jingling: an elf singing randomly generated holiday music, forever and ever. Reload for a new combination of carols. Spiff up and/or ruin holiday parties as needed.

I recorded 36 short Christmas songs over the weekend, all in the same key and tempo; the site selects 3-6 of those at random on each page load, generates a new title based on the selected tracks, then jumps around between them mostly randomly every second between one second long segments of the selected tracks.
Role: programmer, musician, terrible person
posted by cortex (6 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite

i cycled from amused, to disturbed, to murderous rampage very quickly while experiencing this.

also, it could be used as a GEICO ad.

nice work.
posted by bobdow at 9:52 AM on December 15, 2014 [3 favorites]


I started to panic-sweat after the third song.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:29 AM on December 16, 2014


Am I the only one who legitimately loves this and could listen to it for hours? It was borderline unbearable for the first minute, in the way that an unfamiliar and powerfully pleasant sensation can sometimes be. But then the euphoria hit.

I think they should pipe this into the airports at Christmas time. I showed it to my friend Ry and he said: "this feels like the perfect distillation of the Christmas spirit--joy verging on hysteria." Totally.
posted by The Minotaur at 10:37 AM on December 16, 2014 [2 favorites]


I actually like listening to it, too, which created a real dilemma for me working on it: is it that it works, or that my brain is just weird? I sort of worried I was writing it for an audience of one, so I'm glad you actually dig it too.

There's something about the constant churning resynthesis of this kind of thing that my brain just really settles into after a while in a way that I presume is very much a matter of personal preference, which is why a lot of people just find it totally maddening instead.
posted by cortex at 2:06 PM on December 16, 2014 [1 favorite]


I wonder if it would sound more natural with a controllable slider for how much of each song it plays. I noticed that the clips where it chose to double up on a song and switch to another seem to give my brain time to relax right before it got sent down the rabbit hole again.

Incredibly evil. Awesome.
posted by phlyingpenguin at 5:48 AM on December 17, 2014


I think this counts as a late entry to NaOpGenMo
posted by moonmilk at 6:47 AM on December 17, 2014 [1 favorite]


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