A Meditation on Generative Musics (And Their Forms)

Happy holidays! It's a time for celebration, and for quiet contemplation (if that's possible where you are). I'd like to do a little contemplating in public this time out on a subject near and dear to many of us.

Generative musics (and the ways they're constructed) remain a favorite topic in Maxland. Within the boundaries of this forum, we tend to focus most often on how one might generate material - one need only do a search on the Forum using the word generative to get a sense of that.

The Max community has a wealth of talented users who think deeply and subtly about this question - Max user/musicians such as Karlheinz Essl, Leafcutter John, and Agostino di Scipio, create software that is a touchstone for many of us. Similarly, Christopher Dobrian's Algorithmic Composition blog is a treasure trove of concepts and patching for anyone serious about algorithmic work and design, and the occasional Autechre patch (purloined, reverse-engineered, or otherwise) excites Max users of all ages.

But I'd like to take this discussion somewhere else, if I may. Generative art is about generating and organizing variety, and for the "generative" source of this article, I can point to the emails that showed up in my inbox after my review of David Grubbs' Records Ruin the Landscape - notes from old and new friends writing comment on the idea that recordings freeze a given experience in the same way that writing freezes language.

What's had me thinking ever since has to do with the options we have for creating ways of delivering generative content that extend beyond isolated experiences that can be frozen in time. It's often a conversation that turns immediately to a specific set of solutions:

• Web-based interfaces such as Macchina, Wolfram Tones, or Patatap all come to mind here, to name a few. I'm sure you can think of lots of examples. Perhaps you've created some yourself.

• The generative composition as an App. In addition to the examples within the Max/MSP community I've mentioned, there was the wonderful Buddha Machine app that put a half-dozen Buddha Machines on your iPad (and we're waiting for the next iPad update!). Peter Chilvers and Brian Eno are, of course, well known for their generative applications Bloom, Trope, and - most recently - Reflection (by the way - the Reflection app is regularly updated as "seasonal" versions that really do change the output). In addition, there are some interesting Android apps out there such as NodeBeat and Orbits.

For this article, I hope you won't mind my looking a bit farther afield. I finished David Grubbs' book thinking about what precise forms a more open form of a musical object might take above and beyond the stuff on my Walkman/iPod/Smart watch. This article will provide you with some opportunities for holiday meditations on subjects you can take with you into the new year.

Meditating

As long as we’re meditating on how things could be different, one way to do that might be to consider the shape that recent novel approaches have taken. Having done that, we might ask ourselves “What current technologies are out there that I’m not thinking in terms of generative function or content delivery?”

Now that we live in the era of the iPod where random playback is a part of our lives, it may be difficult to imagine a time when one solution to the fixed recorded object was based on the technology of playback itself. CD and Minidisc players included the ability for random selection of tracks or the playback equivalent of the Max urn object - shuffle play mode.

The players’ appearance gave rise to a new version of the recorded object (or perhaps performance is the better word) it became the result of the ordering the material as it's played. Examples of the approach include the Mini Disc release from Gescom (Autechre joined by Russell Haswell), John Schott’s Shuffle Play: Elegies for the Recording Angel, or International Cloud Atlas - Mikel Rouse’s work for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In each case, it's the ordering of the material that makes the experience unique.

You could consider that approach as somewhat similar to another way of working - one that is often the source for fixed documents of a generative piece: random playback using multiple sources – Charles Curtis’ Ultra White Violet Light/Sleep (which is spread over 4 LP sides) or Brian Eno’s Music for White Cube, which used the same materials on random play distributed among tape machines. You can find a demonstration of one of the million ways the piece could turn out here:

So, what current technologies might be repurposed to deliver generative content? Multiple external speakers/tablets? Hacked Amazon Echo/Google Home devices? RFID trackers as parameter generators? A gaggle composed of your friends' smartphones? Game engines with audio support? This is one of those situations where you can imagine someone at a consumer electronics show having their moment of Satori - of looking at something everyone else has right in front of them and seeing something new. You, perhaps.

Delivering

Another source for contemplation has to do with the object that instantiates "the unique experience." While that's often been an opportunity for market speculators drawn by the rarity of something, There are other interesting objects out there to consider. They can be inexpensive approaches to production. The band Icarus produced a large number of unique CDs based on the material for their album as a Compact Disc, with each purchaser getting a unique copy. Similarly Marsen Jules' Shadows in Time provides the unique instance loaded on a USB drive. The cost of media for such outings makes those approaches appealing.

Brad Garton's Looching app was an early generative program whose popularity never really flagged (because everyone loves the Looch) - its current incarnation is as a Macintosh widget. Brad is still very much in the game, and he's taken a unique approach to providing generative content that has much more to do with generative gaming (a la Spore) than app design: His astounding books - My Music Book and My Book of Dreams - compose and generate their music on the fly as you read them.

My final lovely nominee for your perusal in terms of content delivery is Spyros Polychronopoulos' Live Electronic Music sound object, whose photograph opens this article. It's has just been reissued in limited numbers. The object is simplicity itself: plug it in, give it some power, and it'll play one of four compositions, each playback of which is different to the one before it. My copy of it is back at home (I've got an edition one copy), but happily you can find a recording of one of the squillion possible realizations here:

Authoring

There's one more place I'd like to go - one that perhaps will be obvious to Max users: Authoring systems for generative music. Of course, Max is our favorite example (since we can create our own), but I've also been thinking recently about what other authoring environments are out there, and what encounters with them might have to teach us. As with the humble step sequencer, visual arrangements and workflow are, themselves, generators of insight.

I have previously enthused at length about Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers' Scape application as a way to create and experience generative music. Although the original article goes back several years, I would change nothing I said then, and I still use it today. It is an exemplary thing worth your attention in terms of mystery, discoverability, and plain old enjoyment.

But it's not alone, by any means. In fact, the means by which Mr. Eno first ventured into the field of generative music is the origin of another authoring environment: SSEYO's Koan software. As with any good lifeform, Koan has evolved and regenerated and migrated to its current form: Intermorphic's Wotja. If you knew the original, I think you'll find its current form intriguing. If you've never encountered the program, I think you'll find its way of conceptualizing generative content to be well worth your time.

Finally, the folks at Monash University in Australia have developed an interesting graphic environment for generative work: Nodal. It's fascinating in the way that any good, intuitive graphic interface always it. It sends you elsewhere, or directs your attention to making things rather than to the interface itself. There's a lot to think about here.

Woolgathering (What Have I Missed?)

Organizing the things I've presented here involves a set of anxieties. The minute I start to say anything about the subject, I begin to run the risks of either being a lousy editor (because my list of examples is incomplete) or a poor curator (because I don't show the proper care for someone's hard work who I've neglected to mention).

Those twin anxieties go back a long way - they're even encoded in the origins of the words "edit" and "curate" themselves. To quote from Ana Faherty's blog entry on this subject in The Bookseller:

In Roman times editors were the producers of gladiatorial games, impresarios (often the Emperor himself) who staged spectacles to wow audiences while keeping a close eye on costs. Editors held the power to decree whether gladiators lived or died.

Curators, on the other hand, cared for, organised and recorded artworks, finances and even disadvantaged people.

As every good editor knows, definitions of words evolve through common usage, yet there is still a distinction between ‘editing’ (from the Latin edere: to bring forth), which the OED positions as a controlling and content-focused production task, and ‘curating’ (from curare: to care for), which is concerned with selecting, organising and keeping.

I'm hoping you - as readers - can help me out. The most important bit of this posting involves what you might add as readers. I've decided to avoid the urge to be taxonomically thorough, and hope that those of you who are similarly inclined will chime in with your own examples of the things I'll mention.

Tell us all about some cool stuff in the comments. We can all use some more interesting forms of generative art in our lives, and it'd be nice to have a place for all those future students doing generative music projects to land when they fire up their search engines....