Before I come to New York, I meet a generative audio artist – Chi Po Hao. I visited him many times for his speech and workshops about generative audio, machine learning in generative music and how to design systems for generative arts and music.
This week, I read through the “How Generative Music Works, A Perspective” and I thought it is so delicate! The author well organizes the story of how generative music developed and combine live demos that you can play through your browser. It is an intense but easy to learn and feel tutorial that blows my mind!
https://teropa.info/loop/#/title
The website introduces how it means to define a sound system that produces music with a lot of interesting examples. Traditionally, we think music as a static thing with fixed scores and instruments, but in generative art, which is developed since the 1900s, there are a lot of tries out that attempt to design a dynamic system, which means a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network, that can produce music.
( https://teropa.info/loop/#/airports )
This is the inspired example by delaying the track, the artist make environmental music for airport not through fixed-length tracks, but grab some notes, define a length on the loop and turn the virtual machine turn, as the wheel brings the solid line toward the play point, the flute-like sound will fade In and 7 of them made harmonic and peaceful work!
I learn classical music when I was in elementary school for about 7 years, and those new techniques of creating pieces of music really change my imagination of what music heard like and how they can be, even what can be defined as music.
Terry Riley’s in C,
This “score” is defined by 53 pieces and a long rule explanation. It can be played by a group of fewer than 35 people. Everyone in the band can repeat a numbered measure whatever times he wants to. This is a great example to let me think that, maybe we can create more dynamic music for exhibitions, interactive arts, and museums and if the piece is unique at any moment the audience hears it, it might be a great experience!
https://teropa.info/loop/#/incplayer
The website also mentions two ways of generative arts, one is generative methods and one is generative products, the difference between them is one is defining a method and you will get the same result every time, but the other one is every time you play, it contains user interactive and randomness. There is already some generative synthesizer in the APP market, which allows the audience to draw, tap or tilt there phone to engage in the process of making music!
The last impressed example I want to show is Data Sonification, the author mentioned a website called “Listen to Wikipedia”, it sonify the register action and every edit actions of Wikipedia. We, human, often need visual or audio representation to trigger the subconscious that gives us the quantitative or degree of data through non-logical feelings, and I really think that is a great experience if we can perceive those cold data through a way that is so interesting.
There are lots of fascinating examples here, and after reading I definitely discover more possibilities of how to break the imagination of what we thought as music. So I try to make some generative music experiments too! The first one is Music String with particles hitting them.
and the second one below is the music matrix, each particle has a certain cycle of triggering, and I add some drum sound through adding ADSR to noise and sine waves, it’s very playful and I hope that I can dig into the field of generative music more in the future!
