So what is the appeal of generative music? Well, appeal is a very subjective thing and generative music is currently well outside of the cultural mainstream and practiced by a relative few. After Cage developed these chance-based composition techniques, they were immediately adopted and further developed by a wide range of composers - but it was Brian Eno who brought chance and generative music into the digital age when he published generative music created with the groundbreaking SSEYO Koan generative composition software (now known as Wotja, see below) in 1996. Perhaps there could be six possible pathways that could be determined by the toss of a die. For example, a musical event might lead to one of two possible outcomes - this might be decided with a coin toss. In the early 1950s, Cage developed what he called “ indeterminacy,” where certain elements of a musical composition were left to chance. This sort of musical thinking can be traced back to American composer John Cage. This music could be generated by live performers adhering to a designed generative system, software tools that implement generative techniques or even according to random or semi-random environmental phenomena (e.g. In generative composition, rather than composers concerning themselves with the minutiae of the moment to moment musical events, they’ll instead endeavor to design systems that will generate music according to the instructions and parameters they specify in their generative design. With traditional compositions, musical events are planned out in advance, and then performers will typically rehearse these events in an effort to execute them as precisely as possible. In this article, I’ll briefly introduce some of the concepts behind generative music, and I’ll offer some recommendations for software tools that you can work with to produce generative compositions yourself. While that particular composition would require some specific antiquated technology to play back properly today, there are also a series of Eno’s modern generative compositions in the form of iOS apps that can be experienced right now on most iOS devices. A prominent practitioner of this form is pioneering composer Brian Eno, who has released numerous generative compositions including 1996’s historic Generative Music 1 - released as a floppy disk. It’s a fascinating synergy of creativity and technology. These generative compositions often take the form of computer applications when they’re published - in this case the compositions consist of musical elements that are driven by software. Nowadays, generative music is usually created and played back on some sort of computing device due to a computer’s ability to generate and randomize musical events. Like recorded music, generative music is not exclusive to a specific time and place. Like live music, generative compositions will never sound exactly the same from playback to playback - each is unique due to some sort of randomizing process or processes. Generative music shares characteristics with both live and recorded music. With generative music, there’s now a third paradigm for musical expression. A traditional static musical recording can only be played so many times before all of its mysteries are revealed to the listener. Crucially, recorded music has always resulted in a static sound product that was unchanging from one playback to the next (the deterioration effects of analog mediums aside). These inventions meant that recordings could be something designed from the ground up at the musician’s leisure rather than simply documented in real time. This would all change with Les Paul’s revolutionary inventions of sound-on-sound overdubbing and then later (and more importantly) with multitrack recording, which is still the standard system for producing recorded music today. For many years, sound recordings were strictly a real-time documentation of the sounds made during the recording process. Now you could have sound that was captured in a concert hall, for example, played in your living room. Now sound could be captured, stored and reproduced later in a totally different environment. The 1887 invention of a sound recording and playback device was, of course, a major development. Still, live music is wonderful because of its potential for spontaneity and its unpredictability - anything can happen in a live concert and no two live musical performances will ever sound exactly alike. I, for one, appreciate living in this era of advanced music technology which provides us with plentiful and easily obtained musical experiences. This simple musical situation - which seems so primitive to us today - was how human beings experienced music for something like 99.98% of the history of our species. If you weren’t within earshot of a live musical event, then there was no music for you. In the beginning, music was a purely live and purely acoustic phenomenon.
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