232.4M views · Dec 15, 2010 · 15:00 · 1 HN recommender · 4 mentions · discussed 2014–2022
A full piano performance of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14, the Moonlight Sonata, with all three movements: Adagio sostenuto, Allegretto and Presto agitato.
Why Hacker News points people here: Mostly cited as an example piece in audio and AI-music discussions, with one commenter urging people to hear the whole sonata, especially the third movement.
“anyone who's never heard the whole thing owes it to themselves to give it a listen.”HN comment, 2020
“anyone who's never heard the whole thing owes it to themselves to give it a listen.”
Full Moonlight Sonata, third movement especially
> Beethoven: Sonata No 14 (aka Moonlight Sonata), 1st Movement Speaking of, anyone who's never heard the whole thing owes it to themselves to give it a listen. The 3rd movement is off the chain. this video
Example music piece in a hypothetical bit-depth listening test
The correct way to attack this isn't by attacking the theory. It's to gather a lot of people and ask them to press a button indicating whether the audio they hear is 16-bit or 24-bit. If the results are no better than chance, then 24-bit doesn't matter, regardless of how sound the underlying argument is. EDIT: The experiment would also be extremely difficult to design. For example, you'd need to run this test with music, not simple sounds. So the question is, which music? I think whatever is most popular at the time would be a good candidate, because if people are listening to music they hate, they won't care about the fine details of the audio. But that introduces an element of uncertainty and noise into the results which is hard to control for. Some people might deliver accurate results with link but not with this video whereas for others it's the opposite. Or, it could be the exact opposite: Maybe you can only detect whether a sound is 24-bit when it's a simple tone, and not music. Age is also a factor. My hearing is worse than a decade ago. The headphones used by the test are another factor. If you feed 24-bit input to headphones, there's no guarantee that the speakers are performing with 24-bit resolution. In fact, this may be the source of most of the confusion in the debate. I'm not sure how you'd even check whether speakers are physically moving back and forth "at 24-bit resolution" rather than a 16-bit resolution.
“notice the similarity of the last 7 seconds to Moonlight sonata”
Original piece that AudioLM output resembles
I don't see a lot of progress in AudioLM compared to results from 2018: link What's more interesting and concerning - listen carefully to the first piano continuation example from AudioLM, notice the similarity of the last 7 seconds to Moonlight sonata: this video I'm afraid we will see a lot of this with music generation models in the near future.
“It definitely copied a piece of Moonlight sonata in the last 7 seconds of the first continuation sample”
Original piece that AI sample copied from
It definitely copied a piece of Moonlight sonata in the last 7 seconds of the first continuation sample: this video
