![]() ![]() But while Mozart’s sequence of measures generated through chance still had to conform to the stylistic rules of the time, John Cage, using similar aleatoric procedures two centuries later, was free to break every stylistic convention of his time. In the classical period the Musikalisches Würfelspiel (“musical dice game”) became a relatively popular system among composers to randomly generate music from precomposed measures using dice: the technique was pioneered by Johann Philipp Kirnberger in 1757, and one of its most well-known versions is Mozart’s manuscript K. 1026 developed a method for mapping the vowels of a text to a set of pitches to generate melodies (Diaz-Jerez, 2000) and isorhythmic motets of the 14th and 15th centuries used the repetition of rhythmic and melodic patterns of differing lengths for the voice parts, resulting in numerous possible rhythm-melody combinations (Diaz-Jerez, 2000) – an idea which would resurface in the 20th century in the form of process music and tape loops. Later in the Middle Ages various algorithmic and mathematical methods were used to generate melodies and permutations of rhythmic and melodic patterns: the earliest known example of an algorithmic composition dates from the 11th century by Italian composer and music theorist Guido D’Arezzo, who ca. Ideas similar to generative music, however, predate Generative Music 1 at least by two thousand years to ancient Greece: the Aeolian harp was “played” by the movement of wind over its strings, which initiated harmonic resonances to create the harp’s eerie sound (Hankins & Silverman, 1995). for his apps Bloom, Trope and Scape with Peter Chilvers (Digicult, n.d.). ![]() GENERATIVE MUSIC BIDULE SOFTWAREFrom Generative Music 1 onwards these systems have become increasingly digital and more elaborate, realised with dedicated software like those by Intermorphic (the developers of the aforementioned Koan) or through computer algorithms using the Objective-C programming language, eg. Inspired by cybernetics and systems theory, Eno had been using generative processes and systems in his music for records and installations throughout his career, starting with the 1975 release Discreet Music: these often consisted of analogue systems like tape loops of differing lengths or sets of CD players in a shuffle mode playing simultaneously, resulting in everchanging, indeterminate compositions. GENERATIVE MUSIC BIDULE PCThis was a floppy disk release for PC computers with certain kind of soundcards (Creative Labs AWE32 or SB32 soundcard or TDK MusicCard, to be precise), and it would generate endless variations of 12 compositions created by Eno and made with SSEYO Koan software (Intermorphic, n.d.). ![]() The term ‘Generative Music’ was originally used and popularised by Brian Eno with his 1996 release Generative Music 1. Or to borrow another metaphor of his, “generative music is like trying to create a seed, as opposed to classical composition which is like trying to engineer a tree” (Toop, 2004, p. In generative music the role of the composer could be seen more as that of a gardener than an architect, to use Brian Eno’s analogy (Edge, November 10, 2011). It is therefore not a musical genre or style on its own but rather a compositional practice where the composer is more concerned with creating or discovering a system or a process – physical or virtual – that will then generate the music autonomously of the composer, than with writing the composition from start to finish in the traditional sense. It is an “approach to music creation concerning itself with neither improvisation nor explicit composition, but rather with framing an indeterminate system from which music can emerge” (Priestley, 2014, p. Generative music is a form of music in which a piece of music creates itself from an initial set of musical elements and behaviours and rules defined by the composer and/or a system (natural or artificial). ![]()
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