Agreed, and I think that speaks to the difficulty of being sufficiently grounded in both worlds — music and programming. To make generative music that is rich

Agreed, and I think that speaks to the difficulty of being sufficiently grounded in both worlds — music and programming. To make generative music that is rich in detail and follows the thousands of conditioned expectations of listeners and that has a narrative arc ("global connectedness") at multiple time scales, you need that grounding, interesting & unexpected constraints, and a lot of practice. I make generative music (sometimes professionally), so I'll share what constraints I've found helpful. None of these are rules, just battle scars. • Embrace determinism, especially at first. It can be tempting to lean-in to the essence of generative music and have randomness reign supreme ("it goes on forever and never repeats, different every time"), but that makes it very difficult to track the consequences of your decisions as you're composing the system. The stability of determinism really helps you build up a system that can produce minutes or hours-long narrative arcs within the music, and avoid that "lack of global connection". It's this stability that allows conventional musicians to compose music that holds listeners' interest for hours. Hang onto that, and then slowly release it in small, controlled increments. • Pick a genre, reverse-engineer it, write down its rules, and then turn those into systems. Don't just start blue-sky inventing systems that make music, or it won't scale up to a high degree of intricacy, and the result won't be able to hold listener interest. • The tones and textures matter more than how you use them. So if you're using samples, make sure you have samples that can elicit and maintain interest and attention. That means variety — multiple instruments, multiple aesthetics, variations of every sound. If you're using synthesis, spend a good portion of your effort making sure the sounds are lush and varied and convey the right aesthetic. It's powerful to mix both samples and synthesis, and to apply dynamic filtering like reverb or EQ, and that too should be driven by a procedural system. Ultimately, tone and texture are your signifiers of quality and maturity, sophistication, professionalism, so pay them special attention.