Before Art and After Science: Generative Music

My Updates have really be taking a hit recently as I am wrapping up the semester at school. So in place of an album review I am posting a paper I wrote on the topic of Generative Music. Hopefully you find it interesting. I will be done with finals on the 17th so once those are over I will start reflecting on the past year of music.

Before Art and After Science: Generative Music

-William Leetch

            Music has always been set in stone. Even a live performance, something most would consider the most pliable form of the art, is limited in scope by the way the song was written, but what if that didn’t need to be the case? Through the innovations of composers and musicians, such as Terry Riley and Brian Eno, the ever changing art of Generative (also known as procedural) Music has been formed. Generative Music is the next step in the evolution of music and will be a crucial tool for pushing the boundaries of the art-form.
            What exactly is Generative Music? It is the idea that a piece of music can go on eternally changing all the time. It is an idea that has been around for quite a while. Terry Riley is considered one of the most influential and innovative minimalist composers of all time, and his piece In C is one of the first showcases of the idea of Generative Music, before it was called Generative Music. The piece consists of fifty-two bars of music; now on a normal piece the musician would just play those bars and then be done, but not on In C. Each musician is supposed to play each bar until they feel like moving on to the next one. For example the musician might like playing bar one a lot and proceed to play it thirty times, but once they move on to bar two they might find they hate it so they will only play it three times (Eno). With each individual performer or conductor choosing a different number of times to go through each bar the songs will never be performed exactly the same way twice, and that, in a nut shell, is the idea behind generative music. In C is also one of the few non-digital examples of procedural music.
            Another example of analog generative music is Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain. The piece consists of two identical recordings of a preacher repeating the phrase “it’s gonna rain” played on two different tape machines. Due to the inconsistencies present in the analog equipment the recordings begin to fall out of sync. This process changes the way the songs are perceived; as the sounds change. In Brian Eno’s words, “They start to sound like an echo. Then they sound like a cannon, and gradually they start to sound like all sorts of things.” (Eno)
            It is hard not to immediately think ‘computer’ when the word procedural is uttered; which makes it very fortunate that the roots of modern generative music lay in screen savers. Musician and famed producer Brian Eno, the man who is the crux of all things ambient in music, had discovered this screensaver called Stained Glass. What the screen saver did was take an image and “then it sucks them out, multiplies them, chops them about, collages them together in different ways” (Eno). Eno then realized that if he placed another screensaver into Stained Glass as the source image he could create very basic, but fascinating, generative paintings. Eno saw this as a realization of one of his own goals, creating art that never ended. (“B.E. In Con”)
            Eno has stated on multiple occasions that the fact that a record never changes (and has drastic jumps in mood) started to irk him. He solved the latter with his innovation in ambient music which he discovered when someone put a record on to softly during a rainstorm when he was bed ridden (Amirkhanian). Now to fix the former he needed to turn to more computer literate people. Most innovations have two parts: the idea, the shoe maker, and the execution, the elves. Eno is the shoe maker and he just needed his elves. He found them in the British company Sseyo. Sseyo developed procedural software that allowed the user to make a generative song with the preinstalled instruments. The user adjusts the delay and the scale that they wish to use and then the program creates it for the artist. (Eno)
            One of the greatest innovations of procedural music is the way it allows those without musical talent to produce for their own amusement and pleasure. On the iPad there is an app called Bloom. Bloom allows the user to create songs using different moods, simply by touching the screen in different places. A higher point in the screen produces a higher pitch. This creates an interesting bridge in the divide between creator and consumer in the world of ambient music, which has been the goal of that type of music all along.
            So the next question is, what does all this mean to those not interested music creation as an art? In comes Lauri Gröhn, a physicist behind the program Synestesia. The purpose of this program is to generate, using some very complex math, a piece of music for a painting or photo. This allows an artist to exhibit their art with a musical backing without the need for licensing music. Like Bloom, Synestesia is a way for amateurs to work at the same level as pros.
            The most interesting question, one that seems to be on the horizon but has not become fully articulated is, when does this cease to be a form of art? If this progresses further will there be any need for musicians or will mathematicians fill the role just fine? Both are valid questions, and both are curmudgeonly conservative. Anyone who wants to look to the future needs to find a way to adapt to, instead of denounce, new technology. The truly great will always find a way to place their personality in their work; they will find a way to make this new form of music, as Brian Eno put it, “Familiar and new […] like watching a river” (“B.E. In Con”).

Works Cited

Amirkhanian, Charles. “Brian Eno Part 1.” Latest Speaking of Music Rewind podcast from the Exploratorium. 18 Dec. 2009. Web. 27 July 2010.

“Brian Eno In Conversation.” Artscape. ABC, 21 July 2009. Web. 28 July 2010.

Eno, Brian. “Generative Music.” Imagination Conference. San Francisco. 8 June 1996 Web. 27 July 2010

Gröhn, Lauri. "Lauri Gröhn: Translation of the Text "Musiikkia Kuvista 2003", 12.12.2003." Synestesia Software Music: Copyright 2001-2007 by Lauri Gröhn; Synestesia Music Generated from Pictures. 12 Dec. 2003. Web. 17 Oct. 2010. .

Mitts, Håkan. "Interview with Lauri Gröhn – Listen to Your Images!
The 3 Inch Canvas." The 3 Inch Canvas
Dedicated to Promoting Art on Mobiles. 9 Sept. 2010. Web. 19 Oct. 2010. .