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Generative music is a term popularized by
Brian Eno Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (; born Brian Peter George Eno, 15 May 1948) is a British musician, composer, record producer and visual artist best known for his contributions to ambient music and work in rock, pop a ...
to describe music that is ever-different and changing, and that is created by a system.


Historical background

In 1995 whilst working with SSEYO's
Koan A (; , ; ko, 화두, ; vi, công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement which is used in Zen practice to provoke the "great doubt" and to practice or test a student's progress in Zen. Etymology The Japanese term is the Sino-Jap ...
software (built by Tim Cole and Pete Cole who later evolved it to Noatikl then Wotja), Brian Eno used the term "generative music" to describe any music that is ever-different and changing, created by a system. The term has since gone on to be used to refer to a wide range of music, from entirely random music mixes created by multiple simultaneous CD playback, through to live rule-based computer composition. Koan was SSEYO's first real-time music generation system, developed for the Windows platform. Work on Koan was started in 1990, and the software was first released to the public in 1994. In 1995 Brian Eno started working with SSEYO's Koan Pro software, work which led to the 1996 publication of his title 'Generative Music 1 with SSEYO Koan Software'. Eno's early relationship with SSEYO Koan and Intermorphic co-founder Tim Cole was captured and published in his 1995 diary A Year with Swollen Appendices.


Theory

There are four primary perspectives on generative music (Wooller, R. et al., 2005) (reproduced with permission):


Linguistic/structural

Music composed from analytic theories that are so explicit as to be able to generate structurally coherent material (Loy and Abbott 1985; Cope 1991). This perspective has its roots in the
generative grammar Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguisti ...
s of language (
Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...
1956) and
music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspe ...
( Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983), which generate material with a recursive
tree structure A tree structure, tree diagram, or tree model is a way of representing the hierarchical nature of a structure in a graphical form. It is named a "tree structure" because the classic representation resembles a tree, although the chart is genera ...
.


Interactive/behavioural

Music generated by a system component that has no discernible musical inputs. That is, "not transformational" (Rowe 1991; Lippe 1997:34; Winkler 1998). The Wotja software by Intermorphic, and the
Koan A (; , ; ko, 화두, ; vi, công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement which is used in Zen practice to provoke the "great doubt" and to practice or test a student's progress in Zen. Etymology The Japanese term is the Sino-Jap ...
software by SSEYO used by Brian Eno to create ''Generative Music 1'', are both examples of this approach.


Creative/procedural

Music generated by processes that are designed and/or initiated by the composer.
Steve Reich Stephen Michael Reich ( ; born October 3, 1936) is an American composer known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, ...
's '' It's Gonna Rain'' and
Terry Riley Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley (born June 24, 1935) is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his music became notable for ...
's ''
In C ''In C'' is a musical piece composed by Terry Riley in 1964 for an indefinite number of performers. He suggests "a group of about 35 is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work". A series of short melodic fragments, ''In C'' is ...
'' are examples of this (Eno 1996).


Biological/emergent

Non-deterministic music (Biles 2002), or music that cannot be repeated, for example, ordinary wind chimes (Dorin 2001). This perspective comes from the broader
generative art Generative art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that w ...
movement. This revolves around the idea that music, or sounds may be "generated" by a musician "farming" parameters within an ecology, such that the ecology will perpetually produce different variation based on the parameters and algorithms used. An example of this technique is
Joseph Nechvatal Joseph Nechvatal (born January 15, 1951) is an American post-conceptual digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses. Life and work Joseph Ne ...
's Viral symphOny: a collaborative electronic
noise music Noise music is a genre of music that is characterised by the expressive use of noise within a musical context. This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical ...
symphony created between the years 2006 and 2008 using custom artificial life software based on a viral model.


Other notes

*
Brian Eno Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (; born Brian Peter George Eno, 15 May 1948) is a British musician, composer, record producer and visual artist best known for his contributions to ambient music and work in rock, pop a ...
, who coined the term ''generative music'', has used generative techniques on many of his works, starting with '' Discreet Music'' (1975) up to and including (according to Sound on Sound Oct 2005) '' Another Day on Earth''. His works, lectures, and interviews on the subjectArtscape - Brian Eno In Conversation 2009
video) have done much to promote generative music in the
avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretica ...
music community. Eno used SSEYO's
Koan A (; , ; ko, 화두, ; vi, công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement which is used in Zen practice to provoke the "great doubt" and to practice or test a student's progress in Zen. Etymology The Japanese term is the Sino-Jap ...
generative music system (created by Pete Cole and Tim Cole of Intermorphic), to create his hybrid album ''Generative Music 1'' (published by SSEYO and Opal Arts in April 1996), which is probably his first public use of the term generative music. * Lerdahl and Jackendoff's publication described a generative grammar for homophonic tonal music, based partially on a Schenkerian model. While originally intended for analysis, significant research into automation of this process in software is being carried out by Keiji Hirata and others. * In ''It's Gonna Rain'', an early work by contemporary composer
Steve Reich Stephen Michael Reich ( ; born October 3, 1936) is an American composer known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, ...
, overlapping tape loops of the spoken phrase "it's gonna rain" are played at slightly different speeds, generating different patterns through
phasing A phaser is an electronic sound processor used to filter a signal, and it has a series of troughs in its frequency-attenutation graph. The position (in Hz) of the peaks and troughs are typically modulated by an internal low-frequency oscil ...
. * A limited form of generative music was attempted successfully by members of the UK electronic music act Unit Delta Plus;
Delia Derbyshire Delia Ann Derbyshire (5 May 1937 – 3 July 2001) was an English musician and composer of electronic music. She carried out notable work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s, including her electronic arrangement of the theme ...
, Brian Hodgson and Peter Zinovieff, in 1968. However, its use would only be popularized later on.


See also

*
Generative art Generative art refers to art that in whole or in part has been created with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that w ...
* Aleatoric music *
Algorithmic composition Algorithmic composition is the technique of using algorithms to create music. Algorithms (or, at the very least, formal sets of rules) have been used to compose music for centuries; the procedures used to plot voice-leading in Western counterpo ...
*
Cellular automaton A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tesse ...
*
Change ringing Change ringing is the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a tightly controlled manner to produce precise variations in their successive striking sequences, known as "changes". This can be by method ringing in which the ringers commit to memor ...
*
Computer-generated music Computer music is the application of computing technology in music composition, to help human composers create new music or to have computers independently create music, such as with algorithmic composition programs. It includes the theory and a ...
*
Interactive music In video games, adaptive music (also called dynamic or interactive music) is background music whose volume, rhythm or tune changes in response to specific events in the game. History Adaptive music was first used in the video game '' Frogger'' b ...
* Live coding *
List of music software This is a list of software for creating, performing, learning, analyzing, researching, broadcasting and editing music. This article only includes software, not services. For streaming services such as iHeartRadio, Pandora, Prime Music, and Spotify, ...
* ''
Musikalisches Würfelspiel A (German for "musical dice game") was a system for using dice to randomly generate music from precomposed options. These games were quite popular throughout Western Europe in the 18th century. Several different games were devised, some that di ...
''


Footnotes


References

*''Artística de Valencia, After The Net'', 5 – 29 June 2008, Valencia, Spain: catalogue: ''Observatori 2008: After The Future'', p. 80 *Biles, A. 2002a
GenJam in Transition
from Genetic Jammer to Generative Jammer. In International Conference on Generative Art, Milan, Italy. *Chomsky, N. 1956. Three models for the description of language. IRE Transcripts on Information Theory, 2: 113-124. *Collins, N. 2008. The analysis of generative music programs. Organised Sound, 13(3): 237–248. *Cope, D. 1991. Computers and musical style. Madison, Wis.: A-R Editions. *Dorin, A. 2001. Generative processes and the electronic arts. Organised Sound, 6 (1): 47-53. *Eno, B. 1996. Generative Music. http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/eno1.html (accessed 26 February 2009). *Essl, K. 2002. Generative Music. http://www.essl.at/bibliogr/generative-music.html (accessed 22 Mar 2010). *García, A. et al. 2010. Music Composition Based on Linguistic Approach. 9th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2010, Pachuca, Mexico. pp. 117–128. *Intermorphic Limite
History of Noatikl, Koan and SSEYO
(accessed 26 February 2009). *Lerdahl, F. and R. Jackendoff. 1982. A generative theory of tonal music. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. *Lippe, C. 1997. Music for piano and computer: A description. Information Processing Society of Japa SIG Notes, 97 (122): 33-38. *Loy, G. and C. Abbott. 1985. Programming languages for computer music synthesis, performance and composition.
ACM Computing Surveys ''ACM Computing Surveys'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Association for Computing Machinery. It publishes survey articles and tutorials related to computer science and computing. The journal was established in 1 ...
, 17 (2): 235-265. *Nierhaus, G. Algorithmic Composition - Paradigms of Automated Music Generation. Springer 2009. *Rowe, R. 1991. Machine Learning and Composing: Making Sense of Music with Cooperating Real-Time Agents. Thesis from Media Lab. Mass.: MIT. *Winkler, T. 1998. Composing Interactive Music. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. *Wooller, R., Brown, A. R, et al. A framework for comparing algorithmic music systems. In: Symposium on Generative Arts Practice (GAP). 2005. University of Technology Sydney. {{DEFAULTSORT:Generative Music Computer music software