Las Tortugas Comen Queso...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
I’m currently writing my next EP, and this album is interesting inasmuch as the particular set of constraints I’ve set for myself this time involve using only generative techniques for the sequencing. That is to say that while I’ll be recording to and mixing from Live, there are no Live clips playing MIDI; all the hardware and softsynths are driven from generative methods created in Max4Live.
Simultaneously, I decided I wanted to finally learn Spanish, so I joined Duolingo, which is a very nice service. However, many (most? all?) of the learning phrases are generated algorithmically, and I’m left with the lingering impression that there is some synchronicity here. Or, in other words, the turtle eats cheese.
Now, you and I know that turtles don’t eat cheese. Or if they do, they probably regret it later. However, the algorithm that generates statements for me to translate in Duolingo doesn’t know that. It just does animal + verb + food. Thus, we get: las tortugas comen queso. On the one hand, the sentence makes perfect sense. If you actually saw some turtles eating cheese, you’d turn to your monoglot friend Javier and say “las tortugas comen queso” and he would no doubt be in full agreement.
On the other, you’re never going to do that. Because you most likely will live your whole life without ever seeing a turtle eat cheese. So the sentence itself, when used as an example of language, is correct, but ridiculous. This is largely the same thing with generative music, I discover. I was having a conversation with Matthew Davidson (stretta) about this via email earlier this week, and he pointed out that generative techniques probably best serve when they are just one tool in the musician’s toolbox. I, ever the purist, bristled a bit at this; when I set myself a paradigm for recording, I don’t do it by half measures, and the tracks I’m creating play by themselves, with zero input from me, and the resulting recording is already pre-mixed, even.
However, this methodology of mine, while crafty, usually results in a cheese-eating turtle. That is to say that my algorithms are choosing notes that are harmonically correct, but not necessarily something a person would play. I suppose this is the point of the exercise, but I was hoping for a more organic sound.
So my question is thus: what are your feelings vis-a-vis generative techniques? Are you like me, where it should be an all-or-nothing affair? Or is some subtle randomization to a hi-hat pattern or hand-editing MIDI output more to your taste? What’s some good electronic music that was created wholly generatively?
44 comments
I'm sure there are examples of good electronic music made in this way, but I'm drawing a blank. I view generative music as more preliminary stuff to slice up and play around with, but then that's my general approach to everything.
There is a flatness to it I often find, that it needs something from outside to make it more that just an interesting but one-dimensional demonstration of technology.
Hit random until it sounds good !
I cant remember the last time I actually wrote an acid bassline since I got d-16 Phosycon.
i shape the generative stuff to be more "me". either capturing the midi data and editing modifying etc or just using it as inspiration.
there are chunks of autechre tracks that to me sound like they came out of an algorithm or were inspired by jam sessions with algorithms. there's stuff on LP5 that has that kind of arc.. starts at A and ends at Z and the progression is just some kind of slope with some hills and valleys to get there.
i recall messing around with oblivion midi generator on windows years ago and getting some notes and sequences that led to a forehead slap as they just shadowed bits of LP5 in very close ways. that being said.. the layering, sound design, emotion and overall nail on the head factor of that record is staggering to me no matter how it was done
In general I think you can get good interesting generative music (except for drums maybe) for slow and ambient pieces (40-50BPM) . I use Intermorphic Noatikl and feed it into 3-5 synths (real and VST) and I'm never (well mostly never) disappointed, it also allows you to focus exclusively on the realtime interaction of the synth sounds and timbres and not be bothered with keyboard virtuosity (of which i possess none) and it also dumps its MIDI stream into a file that you can always go back and retrieve it . The trick is to go after those rules tables in the program pretty hard to keep it from just being totally random.....Lately I've been using Julien Bayles' Designethemedia's M4Live tools, Matrix, Protoclidean, and Granulizator which are all probability based and a lot of fun, especially if you get a M4Live LFO tool to twist the dials for you...
Is AD Replicant generative? What about BigSeq and Tattoo random resets. They're certainly a touchless audio carwash and add interest to otherwise repetitive beat tracks.
What if you just turn a modular loose with a lot of free running CV cycles patched in here and there....generative sounds come out for sure but when does it cross into the threshold of being music and no longer a noise piece? Seems like that's what everybody with a Buchla ever does.
As for good generative music, you like Brian Eno or you don't but he's got a lot.
PS ...btw I think that Los Quesos Comen Tortugas is probably more fun
Also my favorite Spanish alliteration? "como como como" which means "I eat like I eat"
My submission for the AI comp "Heterodoxic" had a lot of generated basslines in it. (Since it was not chosen, we can assume it was cheese eating.) I had two interlocking 4 bar basslines and ran them through Intermophic's Noatikl. It can mutate patterns endlessly and produce a MIDI file containing its output. I listened back to more than an hour of generated output and chose the best bits that became the bass for the verse, chorus, middle eight, etc. I played or programmed all the other parts.
Personally, I would never attempt to generate an entire piece because pure generative music sounds random and pointless. I use it to get unstuck -- to come up with something fresh that I wouldn't normally play.
i don't know that generative and random are synonymous. generative can be a set of rules controlling something. those rules can be things that are intensely programmed to generate things within specific parameters as part of a larger set of rules.. nests within nest of things that have a starting point and rules to shape their progression over time while still being generative.
i don't think that adds up to 'random' or 'pointless sounding'.
i think there are different depths of generative.. hitting the random button on a sequencer or setting parameters on one part of something to be generative and then there is the process of controlling na entire studio with a set of algorithms and 'seeds' for those and have ways built in for nudging the process at various times to you can continually have some effect on the process and make it turn left/right etc.
I don't like completely auto generated music so I prefer working with Axon. It's not random but when 3 neurons are activated and triggering each other it's already out of my control. The output is useful as is but usually I end up editing the MIDI clips and cut and paste until I'm satisfied. I don't use the built-in synth so much and connect it to other VSTi's or hardware instead. I don't mind blending the results from Axon with non-generative parts (and that's how I use it) but then again, it's not totally random.
I'm with boobs (and by extension Trackdriver.) I am most certainly not talking about just throwing randomization at things. Axon is a good example of what I mean, as it is essentially a VST version of a Pd sketch I made to do exactly the same thing. It isn't random at all, being entirely determinative. However, the patterns are not something we would normally come up with.
-CR
I like incorporating generative elements but I also appreciate being able to exercise some level of control over them as they burble away. I use a Monome clone that I built for myself, and one of my favorite apps is richochet ( http://post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=11957 ) which is generative, but allows you to nudge the ball, so to speak, and dynamically influence the app as it does its thing. If you leave it alone it will happily generate data, but there are certain parameters you can "play" during usage.
Picture a spectrum which one end represents an algorithm that spits random notes. On the opposite end, there's another algorithm that always outputs a particular melody you like. A generative patch will fall somewhere in that spectrum. Leaning too hard either way is pointless. The trick is restricting randomness in clever ways so you get to something a composer would compose, without actually composing it (the REAL trick would be developing a meta-algorithm that could run through the whole length of that spectrum - no idea if that's actually feasible).
One could test a generative algorithm output by hearing a few sequences it comes up with and deciding if it's shit or gold. Of course, that's subjective (what is music, after all?). The logical progression would be incorporating the shit-or-gold test in the algorithm somehow, e.g. by an actual test or by preventing it from generating crap in the first place. Thus, the all-or-nothing approach is more a programming skill test than a musical one: does an algorithm capture all the compositional features the programmer intended to?
Now think again on the shit-or-gold test. It can be applied to generated music or to the generator algorithm itself. The musician/programmer judges the generators. So, is there a way to compose _purely_ by generative techniques? I don't think there is. Maybe using that meta-algorithm I pictured, but how can it be implemented?
In addition to what I've (hopefully) explained above, the "PRES BOTAN -> MAEK MUSIC" approach lead many a programmer/musician tangled in a mess of Max patches without any music as a result.
Viewing generators as part of the toolbox makes more sense to me. That said, I do get the desire for purity and look forward to the new EP.
@RGiskard The shit-or-gold test sounds like a fitness function for a genetic algorithm. It's been applied to music before. Try googling it.
I was oversimpliflying by implying that all generative music involves randomness. However, Noatikl, the particular program that I use, does use a lot of randomness. Personally, I am not interested in writing elaborate generative programs for music because I code for a living and I want music to be fun.
Perhaps. But I've generally been of the no-pain-no-gain school of thought. "Fun" music is afro-cuban night at your local pub / live venue.
-CR
for generative stuff i tend to use beat slicers like LiveCut and Supatrigga, but as what they do gets old very quickly i usually frame the burbling beat slicing with more definite beat material. i use FL (that's Fucking Logic) and often pull out Autofilter and other third party FSU-oriented plugs. i've used this barely stable beta plug called 2warp delay that can add some weirdness. musically i'm curious about algorithmic, but i concur with boobs's observation on autechre. i downloaded Oversteps on emusic and it's very much like what was described. not always successful, and more often than not sounding like someone was running through a process. my composition teacher said there was sometimes value in adhering to that process as it would take you to places your intuition would not go. the musicality of the results can vary. so the art at that point, is finding a process that generates more hits than misses.
A bunch of algorithms have been written to spit out new Bach or Mozart melodies and they were all disappointing. The randomized music I've heard has been pretty forgettable. But I'm old school. I write music with pencil and paper for chrissakes. "If there's gonna be notes playin', *I'm* the one gonna be pickin' em!"
There are plenty of artists across all media who have incorporated aleatoric methods for creation.
Personally, I find much of the resulting work bloodless. (See: Much of Eno's later work, Cage's etchings) That's not to say it's not pretty or interesting. It's just different.
I find it easier to accept in visual art.
In the case of music I think it's a question of what you like and how it is presented. I suppose it's not all that different from improvisation. In either case, it's not my preferred way to work, at least not without some serious editing, selection, and layering of some things created with "intent" on top.
Looking forward to hearing your results.
I can't say that I own _every_ Autechre release, but I have a lot of them. iTunes says 245 tracks, spread over 14 albums and 54 remixes of other artists. (One of those albums is the EPs release, which comprises a whole mess of other releases.) I am very familiar with that band.
My conjecture is that there is much less aleatoric shit going on in Autechre releases than people generally think. Oversteps, for instance, has almost none, in my opinion. I'm pretty sure most of that album is "played" (such as such things are) and sequenced like normal songs. Move Of Ten definitely is; you can clearly hear the pedigreed Elektron timing problems inherent in using MachineDrums and MonoMachines for sequencing in most of the tracks.
Untilted is probably the most "hey, look how crafty we are with Max!eleven!!" of the bunch, but I think, in general, they get credited for a lot of stuff they don't actually do, by virtue of the fact that they never really say what they _do_, and people are all "no fucking way." The two of them have a very sophisticated idea of harmonic flow, and I don't think it does their music justice to assume it is all aleatoric in nature.
There are a couple Max patches floating around that are credited to them. One in particular most likely _is_ them, and when you open it up, there is zero randomness. There are controls for overal flow, but at its heart, it is several dozen sequences running simultaneously, and the guy driving it has to make conscious decisions to control the flow. It has no aleatoric aspects at all.
So maybe they aren't the best example of what we're talking about, is all I'm saying.
-CR
This blog is so great.
During my band's museum sessions, I had a somewhat intense conversation with my bandmate Devin Ocampo about this. He is very anti-random.
He is an exquisite and highly respected musician here in DC --- equally great on guitar and drums --- and we have a pretty great musical relationship. There is mutual respect between us, which allows for some pretty strong disagreements. I rely on him for "pushback," although I guess I've never realized that until I typed this sentence.
Speaking for myself, I am attracted to aleatoric processes, but only within a purposeful deterministic framework; in my case, that is melodic songs. To me, when it works, it feels like gripping the paintbrush loosely. Or splatter painting. You can still feel the intent and the personality of the artist behind the gesture.
This whole area is one of the most exciting aspects of my private musical exploration of the last few years. I had to take a lot of time to figure out my relationship to it and what power (or lack of power) it had.
For me, indeterminacy is a spice.
Its presence is welcome as long as it feels poetic. That's me. I find myself editing aleatoric components of our music quite aggressively until I carve out only the moments that feel exciting or descriptive. Textures that have consequences.
My songs are about stuff; they're rarely wholly abstract. I am trying to get a feeling or an idea or a sensation across. Aleatoricism is just like another collaborator towards that end.
That's my deal with it, but the whole area is rich with philosophical and cultural complexity and that's why i like it. Feels charged.
- c
to my ears UntilTed is very clearly all elektrons. they toured with basically the MD and MnM for that record and no computer in sight. then the next tour they had the md MnM and mpc1000 and nord G2 rack and midi controller.
they, for the most part, have been all hardware for the last handful of releases as best i can tell. they definitely elektron all over everything. they said in an interview that after the untilted tour they saved all the patterns in the machines and had jam sessions that lead to the next album which is obvious if you've heard the glasgow bootleg live recording from 2005 and then listened to Quaristice. some of the same bits in there.
fanboy blurb over ;)
Ah, I meant Confield. It's hard to keep that portion of things straight. I've noticed the Quaristice bits in the Glasgow bootleg, and wondered about the timeline. I think you're correct overall.
Regarding Chad's comments, until recently I had the same general idea. This latest foray, I wanted to get a lot more sophisticated than I had been. It is somewhat painful.
-CR
All music is generative. Sometimes the generative process is ill-defined and lives between your ears. Sometimes it is translated into mathematical, visual, or musical formalism.
Successful generative music is isomorphic to a formal theory of music. That is - if you can enumerate the rules necessary to make the music you want to make in C, PD, Reaktor or whatever, you have also defined the music-theoretical foundations of your work.
That said, Godel, Turing, and others managed to prove that you can't build a perfect mathematical system for doing all of math. Formalism brings pitfalls along with its power. So I wouldn't be surprised if there is interesting music out there, or yet to be created, that cannot be described by a generative framework.
To answer your question - I dial up and down the aleatoric and generative techniques in my music. I often have a process in mind, though, so you could pedantically say that all of my music is generative.
I love the idea of purely generative stuff.. but in reality it always seems to be missing something.
Probably for the same reason Schoenberg used to cheat and use notes that weren't "supposed" to be in any given row - just because he thought it sounded better. And 12-tone / serialist music was supposed to be built on math.
To use a "Tonal" example - is that even within so-called 'strict' key-signatures in classical music, I have a hard time thinking of a piece that didn't use 'accidentals' (notes outside of the key signature) - to say nothing of full-blown modulations.
I only ever use generative elements as a way to get a track started. I like being surprised by the unexpected twists and turns, and let them steer a part of the writing/recording process that way. It's almost like playing with another musician whose improvisational process is somewhat unfathomable (when you play with anyone else for a while, you tend to "know" what they'll play before they play it, unless you're talking about Zappa f.e.).
Combining auto-music with human-music in such a way so that the listener won't be able to tell the difference is the real trick here, in my opinion. It's also great fun; Axon and Ambitron are my current favorites for that.
I think it was Miles or Coltrane or one of those great improvisors that said if you play a "wrong" note, immediately repeat it, then it sounds intentional.
One of the mysterious things about music is that no matter how odd something might seem at first, repetition makes it better.
So, if the turtle eats cheese a few times, you've now got a new type of turtle.
Estoy con tetas.
Pues, como estás estudiando castellano, te contesto como diós manda.
En mi opinión, lo mejor de crear música usando algoritmos generativos es el proceso de selección. Una vez que el ordenador haya vomitado una masa de melodías cutres, elejir las partes que mas te gusten.
He compuesto dos pistas de este modo, seleccionando las mejores partes de pistas compuestas por el ordenador. Normalmente no es algo que usaría en mis pistas, pero pasé 6 meses sin poder componer nada, y grabar estas dos pistas rompieron el ciclo. Las puedes encontrar aqui:
http://kineticmonkey.bandcamp.com/album/two-exercises-in-indeterminate-algorithmic-composition-and-synthesis
Esto es lo que escribí acerca de las pistas:
When inspiration, perspiration and plagiarism fail, the relative safety of mathematics, logic and chance rarely disappoint a composer. By feeding any computer the correct mathematical equation alongside a series of select audio samples an artist is able to bask in the glory of and accept praise for a piece of music written by no one at all. This satisfies both a musician's perceived need to be appreciated by his contemporaries and also the lustful hunger of the modern music consumer. It also serves the purpose of aiding the never ending quest of filling the internal memory of your overpriced portable media player. Holds 40,000 songs? You didn't really need 160 gigabytes now, did you?
that would be Miles - the only guy that could make a cracked note on a trumpet sound achingly intentional...
agree w/ ariston and others regarding generative music/sound as a spice. i'm happy to let the computer decide things but i'm the final arbiter of what i think works for a given piece.
as for Oversteps, i'm nowhere near the autechre expert, owning exactly two releases - that one and Tri Repetae, which i much prefer over the former. i suppose to me it doesn't really matter how they made the music - by chance, process, or painstakingly note by note - if i'm not captivated by the results. sort of like listening to some insanely rhythmically complex music that sounds like random free improvisation. i definitely like to work out various formulae and boundaries or restrictions when composing a piece and sometimes these can lead me in an interesting direction, but i'll toss it out or shelve it if the results sound uninteresting.
It can be very inspirational, though, starting with a predetermined scale and then let the machine have a go at it. I love Reaktor Spiral for this, as it gives you real-time control of most of the parameters, and still can give you unique versions every time. Recording it's MIDI output and keeping the nicest bits has been part of my workflow™ for a while now. Jamming with these parts later on have been even more fun.
Also, on the modular, I can listen for hours on end to a quantized output of the Noisering, I know that makes me kind of a sad person :-)
Since someone (appropriately) mentioned Eno: IMHO his best generative pieces pre-date the term "generative" (as in this context) itself, and didn't involve computers. I'm thinking of the first side --sorry, I'm showing my age. Recordings don't have sides any longer. I'm thinking of the first track of "Discreet Music" which, according to the original liner notes which were never reproduced on any of the digital releases of the work, was created by a system of long tape delay and an early digital sequencer. Eno's involvement during the recording of the piece, after setting the system in motion, consisted of "occasionally altering the timbre of the synthesizer's output by means of a graphic equalizer." (See http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/discreet-txt.html for the entire liner notes.) Other subsequent sources state that he wasn't even in the room during portions of the recording, and if I remember correctly, the final product is also played at half speed relative to the original tracking, which came about by accident when he first played the recording for Fripp.
I'm also thinking of the second track on "Music for Airports" which consists entirely of about half a dozen long tape loops of different lengths (cut at random, according to Eno), each containing a single sung note. The piece was created by playing all of the loops simultaneously (or overdubbing them, more likely); the not-strictly-random-but-definitely-unpredicted phase relationships of the loops generated the music.
Now, I don't recall CR to be a huge Eno fan, but those are the examples that come most readily to mind, and they are defining pieces of the entire genre. I first heard them when I was about 14 and I still listen to them now and then, over 30 years later.
By contrast, I find Eno's later album, "The Shutov Assembly", nearly forgettable. Eno has said that almost all of it was composed with Koan Pro, which was Noatikl's predecessor. The authors of Koan made much ado in their marketing about Eno's enthusiasm for Koan; his mentions of it in "A Year With Swollen Appendices" are somewhat less complimentary. In any case, "The Shutov Assembly" is mostly Koan output, and IMHO it's just not a very good work.
As for the all-or-nothing question: I love the notion of purely generative music, in theory. It's a notion that has in one way or another motivated a good deal of what I've done with computers ever since hearing Eno as a teenager, perhaps most conspicuously my 10-year-long involvement with Max. But in practice, I've found that generative music tends to be far more interesting to create than to listen to. I think of it as one tool among many, and almost no tools are useful when used exclusively.
--Adam
It's important to feel that what you're receiving is communication from another human, right? Music is engagement.
I mean, I don't see much point in music if that's not the case.
I enjoy looking at a waterfall --- it's complex and pretty how water patterns repeat or don't repeat. But it's not art.
It becomes art when someone films it or photographs it or paints it or describes it in a poem, etc.
The sense of human-to-human engagement/communion is key.
- c
Ah, but Chad, it's possible that you're inadvertently arguing both sides of your point--or at least bringing up issues of what's being communicated.
Take the example of CR's proposed EP based upon material generated by things he's constructed with Max4Live. What the music communicates is the result of his creative process of constructing those things.
If a waterfall becomes art when someone captures or interprets it through film, photography, painting or poetry, does not the output of a software process become art when someone records it and presents it to you in an MP3?
Or, to come at it from an entirely different angle: what if CR hadn't said anything at all in advance about how he's making his next EP, and instead had just delivered the finished product without telling us that it was entirely the result of generative processes? If the music moved you, the sense of engagement/communion would be present, yes? So does that sense depend entirely on the end result? Isn't the opportunity for the audience to know a good deal about the processes that went into creating a musical work a fairly recent innovation (if it is that) in the history of recorded music? I'm thinking of Beauty Pill's own Summer Residency as relevant here.
And while coming at this topic from that angle: why is it that so many generative works, upon their release, are accompanied by explanations of their creation, when such explanations are quite rare for musical works in general? Is it because the work itself is inherently a different art form and as such the audience needs these explanations in order to have sufficient context to evaluate/enjoy the work? Is it because the creators of the work want it to be clear that the audience is being presented with an example of their work as a maker of generative systems as much as a maker of music?
--Adam
@Duke Fame "Sorry, but a human soul should choose the notes."
wtf is a 'soul'? and how am i, or anyone, not choosing the notes if i'm telling the application i designed how to behave? how many hairs would you like to split?
"The thought of Jimi Hendrix using a generative algorithm to make music makes me want to weep."
no one is saying that jimi hendrix should have used an algorithm or that we should only write music using algorithms.. that'd be stupid.. obviously.
but, is there no room for different ways of doing things in your methodology? or no room in your listening library for music made by people doing things not the way jimi hendrix did?
if so then you're kind of limiting yourself and what you hear.
for me, the generative stuff is an attempt to make something expressive but also something organic at the same time. processes like distortion, feedback, beat slicing, glitch are for me attempts to somehow wrestle something boring and predictable into the category of natural and organic sounds, which are governed by chaos theory, or orders so complex that they sound random. Cage, Feldman, Eno were large proponents of trying to remove their ego from the equation (which as we all know is capable of leading us down well-worn paths, because we, as humans often like safety over innovation). at the same time they did this, paradoxically they created wholly unique and interesting approaches that identified each of them as icons of their generation.
if you take Hendrix, he was doing those same things, dancing at the edge, flirting with chaos in both his body and mind and with his instrument, showing Townshend how it was possible to make music while trashing it at the same time. he was allowing different processes to influence him, musical and otherwise. he certainly was a genius, but he improved as a result of letting in these influences, although obviously he danced a little too close to the flames...
@boobs: Wow, I think I struck a nerve. If you built a badass robot and constructed and programmed it to paint a beautiful masterpiece on canvas based on a certain set of rules, and it was a stunning success loved the world over, would you say that you painted the picture? Or did the robot do it? Would your answer change if you stopped the robot 50% of the way through and finished the rest with your own hand, or if you chopped up and rearranged some of what the robot did?
I appreciate your "one of many tools in the bag" philosophy absolutely. I personally just don't dig the detachment that occurs when the machine starts making some of the creative decisions. It doesn't feel right to me.
Or, maybe I'm just old-fashioned and closed-minded. If it works for you, don't let my personal take on it rain on your parade.
I'm with boobs.
@Duke Fame - you didn't strike a nerve.. i just think statements like "a human soul should choose the notes" are total nonsense on many levels. i think i understand what you mean but any time someone says "soul".. all bets are off as to what that person means.
as for your robot scenario... i don't even know where to start.. .and don't think i'll bother as really getting into that will be rather exhausting and i have other stuff to do and i'll just end up talking about "the singularity is near" by kurzweil or maybe various PK Dick books and say something about the robot programmed by me to behave like me would be an extension of me.
and re this: "I personally just don't dig the detachment that occurs when the machine starts making some of the creative decisions. It doesn't feel right to me."
of course.. writing music is a personal thing and no one is going to force you to get into the process in a way that you do not enjoy which is why the jimi Hendrix comment you made just floats away and has no bearing on anything. i don't think anyone is debating if one way is better than another or if all musicians should learn to program and make only generative music.
my guess would be that if a person is trying to use generative processes and is experiencing this "doesn't feel right" situation then that person is just doing it wrong or isn't very good at it yet.. and some people aren't good at it.. i don't claim to be but i like certain aspects of doing generative things and incorporating them in my music. i find doing some complicated thing to help me make music to be satisfying in some way though some times is masochistic but never a waste of time because i learn something even if it doesn't end up being part of a song.
i'd guess there are people who are really good at it to the point where you or i couldn't tell the difference between notes they played/chose by hand/or let loose with an algorithm to generate.
If you view the generative process as just another tool that an artist uses for creation then the musician did actually create the piece. I would argue that a musician creating a robot and programming that robot to write music in a particular manner is just another form of a tool, like a guitar or piano. It might be one more level of abstraction but ultimately the robot would not have created the music if the musician had not told the robot what to do.
This argument happened during the 80's around whether or not the musicians creating hiphop were real musicians since they just pieced together sampled bits of records. It's a different skillset than creating a rock track so you can't really compare the two. Just like I wouldn't compare the Rolling Stones to Bach.
Now if I just bought a device that was per-programmed by someone else to squawk out sounds and pressed record and walked away for two days would I call that creativity? Not really. I would call that content curation versus content creation. I would be choosing the 10 tracks out of 5 hours of audio that was recorded but I didn't actually have any input into creating the music. Now if I provided some sort of seed for the algorithm and somehow shaped what was being produced then I would consider that creation.
@ D'MacKinnon. Exactly.
Sorry I didn't participate in my own discussion, but I spent the last three days in a hotel that had the worst wi-fi I've ever come across; it almost didn't deserve the name.
In any event, a lot of these comments come down to the semantics of the word "creation." I'll say this much: creating something that can engage in the act of creation and produce a meaningful result is identical to the act of creating a meaningful result itself; the result is what matters. Either it engages the listener or it doesn't.
To prove this, I invite you to find a really nice piece of audio-reactive video art, then tell me that the guy that created the code isn't creative. You can't. The process is nearly identical to making a nice piece of generative music. Either the creator is good at what he does, and meaningful results ensue, or he isn't, and they don't. QED.
-CR
I think some of the reasons why AE's generative output produces such good results is because of the carefully constructed sieves and the fact that the elements are listening to and interacting with each other.
Seems to be where most people fall down
Especially when trying to pass off an obvious hoax http://youtu.be/jTOERwdZO-A
I hope this is relevant, bear with me....
FZ in liner notes for Rubber Shirt off Sheik Yerbouti-: "The bass part is extracted from a four track master of a performance from Gothenburg, Sweden in 1974 which I had Patrick O'Hearn overdub on a medium tempo guitar solo track in 4/4. .. A year and a half later, the bass track was peeled off the Swedish master and transferred to one track of another studio 24 track master for a slow song in 11/4. The result of this experimental re-synchronization is the piece you are listening to. All of the sensitive, interesting interplay between the bass and drums never actually happened..."
Much as I'm reluctant to disagree with Frank, the interplay does happen, in the only place it counts, our heads.
And of course he wouldn't have released it if it wasn't interesting. The creator was very good at what he did, and meaningful results ensued. As CR says, "QED".
To me, it's a good track in it's own right but there is an extra, intellectual level of enjoyment provided by knowledge of the inquisitive intelligence at play in it's creation.
Good music is good music; understanding it's creation just adds to the experience.
How did we get through this conversation without anybody making a hologram Tupac reference?
- c
It might be cool if the hologram Tupac acted for itself, made its own music based on ruleset inputs, in the same way that David Cope has worked with style analysis of composers.
Alas, it was just more Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner.
there are a lot of groupies having relations with the hologram, and thanks for making me watch all the youtube videos of turtles eating cheese, people get off on that shit?? I don't get it!!!
To me, generative tools/software/code are like instruments. A lot of generative music is like hearing someone playing the presets on a particular synthesizer, drum machine, or a sound played on any more traditional instrument. Anyone can make an album using any of those, and the musician could randomly or possibly innately be good, but the result is not anywhere near as likely to be perceived as good/worthwhile/musical.
What makes music interesting to me, is the human element and heavy knowledge and use of that instrument/device/software (or maybe music knowledge in general) to make something more than the sum of the parts. What this means to me is that the generative stuff I've heard that I've liked or appreciated or not hated has had much more human influence on it (as far as I know).
I guess I'm kind of saying that while a lot of people would consider generative music to maybe not be good but to still be classified as music, I might even go so far as to say that generative without a musician's influence is more akin to a preset than music. More on the tool side of things.
I think that a musician making a generative piece of software would end up with a different result than an artist or more purely programmer-minded person. Even if what comes out of the software is truly purely generated, the code will have been influenced/designed with that musical type of thought behind it, and likely sound more "musical" or satisfying to myself.
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