Show HN: Mixtape of 200 “futuristic” songs circa 1980

7 points

3 years ago

I'm posting this long mix of 200 "futuristic" music recordings, in chronological order (from the mid 1970's to the mid 1980's). Some are obvious (eg: "She Blinded Me With Science") while others are long forgotten (eg: G.G. Tonet's "Dedicated To Norbert Wiener" or Jyl's "Silicon Valley")

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Circa 1980 Mixtape

https://soundcloud.com/italian_radio_1983/space-italo-etc-circa-1980

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While the theme of the linked mix (ie: tech) probably interests some here, it is likely too fluffy for many others so apologies for that. This thing took me almost two years to finish, so in a moment of weakness I am going ahead and posting it here.

There actually is a tech angle to why it took so long. After I gathered the 200 audio tracks I wanted, I wound up stymied for several months because trying to match the timbre and loudness of 200 songs overwhelmed me. During that time I began writing a program in my spare time to band-split all the files and match their perceived loudness. I got around half-way through that when OpenAI released GPT4. On a whim, I asked it to write a BASH script to perform the auto-EQ: a couple evenings of minor tweaks and it was done https://github.com/italian-radio/autoeq so I went ahead and completed the mix.

The final mixing together of songs - I am not a DJ and have no experience beat-matching - was also done programmatically (wrote a program that takes start- and end- times of the regions to crossfade, and then ramps samplerate up or down for the two tracks.