![\"pipo\"](\"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/pipo.jpg\")
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A graduate from our Coursera Creative Computing MOOC\u00a0recently wrote to us about his project to enable songs and playlists on Soundcloud to mutate and grow.<\/strong><\/p>\n Attila Haraszti –\u00a0who describes himself as “a\u00a0self-made third culture kid based\u00a0in Berlin” – is a\u00a0producer and DJ with releases under the Rawfare<\/a> moniker.<\/p>\n “I did\u00a0the Coursera Creative Computing<\/a> just for fun during the summer of 2014. It totally changed my perspective of what’s possible regarding creating interactive music applications. The main effect was that it encouraged me to create my own, updated context for music instead of relying on what’s provided by the outdated structure of record labels and typical music platforms. Artists can and should create their own “game”.<\/p>\n After completing the course, Haraszti wrote a rave-tinged track called Pipo<\/em>, inspired by listening to his neighbour screaming at her pet\u00a0parrot.<\/p>\n “In many ways, I found it to be a great fit for a fun experiment. I’ve increasingly felt that releasing tracks in a standard, ‘static’ way doesn\u2019t make much sense anymore. It doesn\u2019t ‘work’. The shelf life of a typical release is getting ridiculously short \u2014 you get a week, maybe two of peak attention at best. Great works get buried under the avalanche of new content, racking up only a few hundred listens.<\/p>\n “I wanted to reflect this relationship somehow –\u00a0by connecting the markers everyone seems to care about (play counts etc.) to the content of the track itself. In short, the idea was to make Pipo<\/em> ‘alive’.\u00a0Just like the neighbor’s screaming, the track had to be as annoying as possible. I put the final master of the track through some of my favorite tools and ended up with a handful of trashed-up versions.”<\/p>\n Soundcloud Replacer<\/strong><\/p>\n If you have\u00a0Pro account on Soundcloud, you\u00a0can\u00a0replace the audio file uploaded for the track, without losing any of its statistics. This feature is a godsend in case you make a mistake that needs to be corrected, but, a more interesting use is to CHANGE the track entirely, depending on some feedback.<\/p>\n “With that, my idea was fully formed – upload a completely distorted track to Soundcloud, change it to progressively cleaner versions as more people listened to it, and gradually dial the distortion back if the weekly play counts are insufficient.”<\/p>\n In order to do this, the replacement process had to be fully automated.\u00a0“My initial thought was to program it using the Soundcloud API<\/a>, but\u00a0while you can use it to make programs to upload and delete tracks from connected accounts, it doesn’t allow you to replace them.\u00a0Luckily there’s a way to make almost anything on the Internet bend to your will \u2014 using browser automation. The details took me quite some time to figure out, but as you can see, the process works well. This is 100% automated, ghost-in-the-machine style stuff \u2014 I’m not touching anything.”<\/p>\n