Created: August 24, 2023
Updated: October 12, 2024
Updated for version: 0.9.1
What is it?
The Cydrea Music Catalog works much like typical music catalogs from real-world record labels. It is composed of artists and bands, and their albums. Each artist has its signature music style and released one or more albums.
The Cydrea Music Catalog is huge, almost infinite, containing 1 quadrillion artists, with an estimated 60 quadrillion songs. I say "estimated" because it would be necessary to generate all albums and count all songs in each one to reach an exact number. But the laws of statistics say this number is close.
But... if the albums were never created, how do we know they're there when we request them?
How can it be so big?
Is it repeating itself over and over again? No. To achieve this, the catalog was built through the combination of two technologies: procedural generation and A.I..
Cydrea Music combines two technologies in order to predictably have a very big data set that can be used to build songs. The first technology is procedural generation, and allows you to predict a data sequence starting from any number you choose. The second technology is what everyone is broadly calling "A.I.".
So, procedural generation allows the catalog to be very large while still using moderate resources, while "A.I." allows the catalog to be original and diverse.
To have a better idea on how these technologies work in Cydrea Music, please read the article "The Technologies Behind Cydrea Music".
How to find what you want?
So, with such a huge number of artists and songs, how can you find anything?
Cydrea Music provides you the tools to search and find the music you like. You can navigate the catalog by artist or by genre. Independently of how you'll work with the Cydrea Catalog, your search will always be like a discovery trip: you'll never know what you will find!
Diversity
The Cydrea Catalog includes most of the genres you know. For now, a total of 78 genres are defined. Along with the more common Rock, Pop, Metal, Hip-Hop and House, you will find lesser known genres like soca, chutney or cha cha.
Creating a good, familiar-sounding song in any genre is a challenge and a task for the accuracy of the A.I. algorithms. During the Early Access phase, there isn't much accuracy due to lack of time, but it will be improving over time.
Cydrea Music A.I. relies on a database of rules, rhythm and melody archetypes, and instruments. These resources are fed into Cydrea's A.I. algorithms, that combine them with a little bit of... "creativity", in order to obtain an original song in seconds.
The result is a never-ending stream of original, diverse-sounding, and sometimes, surprising compositions that you can use in whatever creations you want.