My co-worker would bolt a plasma spectrometer with accelerometers on it to a vibration table with some special isolators between the instrument and mounting baseplate,

that sounds so fucking awesome

and we'd shake them with a sine sweep survey starting from like 1 Hz up through, I dunno, 40 kHz or something like that, and a power spectrogram level was input to govern the amplitude around each frequency. JUST like what you're doing with mics? We do it too.

Well what you're doing is ringing out the frequency response, right? You're trying to find constructive modes that are going to fuck you over while strapped in a rocket. You do that with an equalizer if it's sound or filters if it's an electromechanical system. I've linked this before, the eldritch magic starts at 3:35:

We'd already calculated the approximate normal modes of the instrument from 3D CAD models (we used Ansys)

For the record the last time I used ANSYS it was a command-line program that ran on a DEC Alpha.

By the way, at GSFC, they have like a 10 foot diameter gramophone to just blast shit with.

that sounds so fucking awesome

Which has its uses, heh, though perhaps mostly uncommercializable.

You are grossly underestimating the ease with which bad mixes can be produced.

Hadn't heard any AI tunes yet, and figured there was good reason for it. I don't go looking for them, and a really good one would have found its way to me by now if it existed.

The computer music cats have been doing "generative music" for a long time. It's easy as shit and doesn't require an LLM. Most of them are some form of neural network somewhere; "random ambient generator" has been an off-the-shelf product category for 20 years. Here's a free plugin for Kontakt.

Here's a walk-through for Ableton.