2020-08-20 Generated Music

I’ve just bought the “album” Eōn by Jean-Michel Jarre. I listend to a lot of Oxygene when I was a teenager. The idea that fascinates me is that you’re buying an app: you’re buying the generator instead of the generated music. Sure, I also hate it being a binary tied to the Apple store and the devices I currently own that I need to keep buying. But I do like the idea of buying a generator.

Eōn on Jean-Michel Jarre’s page

I guess this is still something that I want to do eventually: to write a system that generates random music with a simple controller where I can drag a “plot point” towards the various “poles” appropriate for a role-playing game: fights, exploration, haunted, jovial, urban, underground, forest, grasslands… Something like that. It would influence the samples that get used, the speed, the rythmical complexities, the keys, the harmonies, the instruments. I keep thinking of it as the “endless soundtrack generator”.

Generating Music, back in 2018

When I talked about it on Mastodon, @mdhughes noted that there’s a Björk album called Biophilia, which has an official recording and also has an app, something he described as “a game-like toy for each song that makes (endless? many) variations.” Interesting!

@mdhughes

Biophilia on Bandcamp

on Wikipedia

@nf mentioned that Brian Eno made similar apps.

@nf

Generative Music

@xurizaemon mentioned that they listen to some generative environment audio as white noise but now they prefer recordings of environments which have the benefit of local familiarity. An interesting idea. I’m reminded of my 1h recording of birds at sunrise in the Atherton Tablelands or in Hamburg.

@xurizaemon

Sunrise in the Atherton Tablelands

Birds in Hamburg

@hecanjog said that releasing generative programs outside of app stores makes a lot more sense to them and linked to the Lexikon Sonate as an example.

@hecanjog

Lexikon Sonate Homepage

Lexikon Sonate on Soundcloud

Anyway, I think I need to bring it back to programming somehow. What is possible for me to do and what isn’t? I think I’m never going to be the kind of sound wizard that it takes to edit music in Pure Data (an open source visual programming environment), VCV Rack (an open-source virtual modular synthesizer) or something like Klankwelle (a modular synthesizer for iOS).

Klankwelle

Pure Data

VCV Rack

So… back to SuperCollider and Overtone? The again, Sam Aaron moved on to do Sonic Pi. Ruby is not so bad, I guess?

Overtone

Sonic Pi

Or roll my own… using… something. Yikes!

#Music #Generator #Programming