VaporBot

Born in cyberspace, with roots in punk rock, a foundation in computer science, and more than a pinch of sci-fi futurism, VaporBot produces a unique brand of artificially improvisational synthetic jazz-wave, called robowave, that's great for chilling, studying, sleeping, or just keeping on in the background.

Inspired by the niche electronic musical genre of Vaporwave, I created a python script to generate songs and upload them to Youtube.

After the first version, subsequent versiosn of the script ran with a different "album title". The first version simply downloaded videos from Youtube, slowed and chopped the audio and then generated a new video using a composite of pre-selected images.

Later versions added additional synths and then cut out the downloads completely to generate the audio via scripted MIDI. The video components started using an API to download random images and added glitch effects. "Yosemite.txt" was the first to use actual video, rather than a still image with glitch effects.

The Youtube channel was automated and has over 400 songs. The Spotify channel has several albums that were originally posted to Youtube and more than 1 follower.

At some point, the bot aspect took a backseat to the music aspect. Much of the code is in a Jupyter notebook on my laptop that I experiment with to just make music.