6 ms·

I like this quote “Don’t try to procedurally generate something that you can’t already create”. I’ve been actively making music full time for a good 15 years n

I like this quote “Don’t try to procedurally generate something that you can’t already create”. I’ve been actively making music full time for a good 15 years now. I work as a writer/producer and despite all of my experience and theoretical understanding I’d probably be hard pressed to come up with a way to algorithmically describe my musical instincts in a way that generates satisfying music. I think a large part of the trouble comes from the notion that most music requires a certain degree of subversion of expectation. And not randomly selected subversions either. Deliberate choices that feel meaningful. I could spend a lot of time defining one melodic phrase and immediately need to tweak the rule for the second half or a reharmonization. Not to mention rhythmic cadences and groove. I’ve been doing a deep dive on Autechre recently and am revisiting interviews where they hint at their process. The duo is notorious for using self-built tools that algorithmically generate the sounds, texture, and rhythms. These programs are not expected to run independently or generate great music on their own. They are actively guided and performed by the band as they jam and compose. In this way it’s more of an augmentation of their will that allows them to create such rhythmically dense compositions. In re-reading these interviews what I found interesting is that for them the act of building the program is one and the same with the act of composition. They’re defining the parameters, limits, and characteristics of a composition and then using their judgement to steer and flex the sonic structures that they’ve built up. When it comes to generative music, I think they’ve got the right attitude in not expecting the software to do the heavy lifting. It’s instead treated as an extension of their performance.

scsilver 6y ago
I produce music aswell. I think some genres like techno could have procedurally generated tracks, that could be then brought to an artistic level by a dj mix of those tracks. The dj would provide that needed subversion and unpredictability to make it worth listening to.
briankelly 6y ago
I'm just a hobbyist but I play guitar and am getting more into production (drum machines, synths, sequencing multi-sampled instruments, etc.) Recording my guitar gives me an appreciation for the fact that as great as virtual instruments are, there is still so much left on the table that a good instrumentalist (let alone a vocalist) is doing and often not even thinking about it. There's much more to it than playing the right notes at the right times if you want it to sound right, much less good. Stuff like the Linnstrument is taking it to higher levels, but I think the horizon for Faux-y Bonnamosa is a little further out than some in the tech crowds might imagine. The bar might seem a little lower for pure electronic genres but it'll still be some time before Steve Faoki is consistently better than the real deal.
- djeiasbsbo 6y ago
  Well, playing and recording a live instrument is much more expressive for many reasons. But the biggest thing are these little random bits and noises that can be present when recording with a microphone and inconsistencies such as pitch fluctuations. This can be emulated with soft synths and samplers but with many limitations. When I produce music digitally, I usually get the most interesting results by randomising devices. For example, in Ableton Live there is a device called "Device Randomiser" that can randomise other devices. A few of these in a chain can produce crazy sounds over time. Then these can be used together with more traditional soft synths, for example by using them as an external vocoder signal.
Igelau 6y ago
> most music requires a certain degree of subversion of expectation And that's usually a really small amount within the confines of "what works".
megameter 6y ago
I've started down the same path that Autechre has gone recently - just using Sonic Pi as the live-looper to build up a library of part-players and a conductor. Then output MIDI to a DAW to use plugins and make further arrangement and mix decisions. The thing is, the sound design is, in a sense, the easy part. You can buy the sound you want, with the substantial exception of some acoustic and vocal performances. You can feed it into a tremendous number of processing effects and get artistically interesting results by turning the knobs. This has been commodified: you can buy up software bundles for holiday sales right now and have an absolutely vast kit of professional production tools for perhaps $500 USD; less, going to zero, if you focus just on essentials and make good use of freebies, more if you aim for high-effort multisampled instruments and certain high-end plugins. And so we have a golden age for the improvisational electronic jam session. There's no need to build your own patches, though it helps from a sound engineering perspective to have those skills. But compositions aren't jam sessions, they're a tighter, more directed layer of structure than that. And the problem that rears its head with algorithmic approaches is that it isn't reducable to one algorithm with different values, rather, a different piece is a different algorithm, and the final result is assembled most easily by switching between layers of intentional, hand-picked sequences and automations that extend upon them. But if you go in agnostic to the principles driving that material, as it seems the author did, the result doesn't go in any coherent direction, and so it doesn't sound musical. Many people like the old chiptunes on the C64. One of the distinguishing features of many of them is the fact that the sequences are, in fact, algorithmic in this way. They were not composed entirely on the piano and then painstakingly input as a sequence of events. Some were, of course, but memory constraints drove many more towards compression, if only at the level of "loop this pattern", and the lengthiest tunes leaned heavily on algorithms(one example: Times of Lore). There is no requirement for algorithmic approaches to also be academic experiments and these tunes often demonstrate that. Somehow this fact gets very little representation in the modern DAW environment. Sequences are uniformly multitrack tapes, printed scores, piano rolls, tracker grids, or lists of events. If they're particularly cheeky they might think to use divisions of a circle. But you can define an interesting sequence in a few lines of code, really: you just need to tap into a pattern that has some intrinsic chaos(predictable, but in a difficult-to-compute way - cellular automata, double pendulums, fractals or even just a polyrhythm all work) and subsequently shape it to the needs of the larger structure. It's the use of the mathematics that matters, and traditional theory is kind of burdensome in this way, because it often obscures the mathematics in trying to convert it into something that can be muscle-memory trained and called out verbally.
tessierashpool 6y ago
Algorithmic music has a history stretching back at least as far as Mozart. His algorithmic music sounded good. His non-algorithmic music sounded good too. Not a coincidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel
- Slow_Hand 6y ago
  I'd be curious to know how tightly Mozart would have stuck to the outcomes that the dice dealt him. I could imagine him also using the dice as a jumping off point for compositional suggestion but disobeying the dice for a round if he wanted to follow an idea in a different direction. Because he could hear the composition as it was being generated, I can just as easily imagine him deviating from the dice-scheme if he saw an opportunity for something interesting. Who knows. A similar thing happens in Schoenberg's twelve-tone system. For melodic writing, the composer is locked into using the next pitch in their tone-row, but the art of it comes in them exercising their ability to repeat that prescribed pitch or change it's register however they see fit to get the best possible musical effect. It's quasi-algorithmic in that the pitch sequence is prescribed, but the writer is allowed to get creative with the other musical dimensions to make it as compelling as possible. That said, it generally doesn't make for very enjoyable listening. At least, it's an acquired taste. 20th century classical music got pretty far up it's ass with the "games for games-sake".
  - tessierashpool 6y ago
    Mozart was not rolling the dice. Mozart created the melodic fragments; people who bought the sheet music got instructions to roll their dice to combine the fragments into new melodies.
grawprog 6y ago
Hmm, i play and make music, but i can see a place for randomly generated music, or at least randomly generated music as a tool for creation. But, like with a lot of randomly generated video games, it's easy to make them suck. I think something maybe more like A robot named fight's approach to procedural generation may be better for music, random generation based on pre-assembled parts, or maybe random generation to create variation for pre written parts. A lot of arpeggiators already do something similar. Though, i do agree with the general premise of that and think any randomly generated parts should be hand touched up by someone who knows what they're doing and should be used as any other tool in a musician's arsenal and not as a way to just generate songs wholesale. There is a potential for random generation to be used creatively in music, it just shouldn't be used as a crutch to cover lack of skill or as the sole means by which a song is created.
- Slow_Hand 6y ago
  Well for the band in question, Autechre, I'm not trying to suggest that they compose by having the machines generate parts and then they go back to tweak those parts. It's more as though the program they write for a composition is something to be steered and actively adjusted on the fly. THAT's the performance. They're not micro-managing note and rhythm choice. They're performing by adjusting probabilities, or adding new seed conditions on the fly, or controlling meta functions. I believe their compositional style is more akin to a long form improvisational jam that may then be edited down for conciseness and redundancy. I don't get the impression that they're going back and tweaking the fine details at this stage in their long career. They're way too prolific to keep that up. Here's an example of some tracks that are typical of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMD_oenMGVk&list=OLAK5uy_lvgLLXuJvmlSA-QH0-R95CzhYx00aRnJM&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMD_oenMGVk&list=OLAK5uy_lvg... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRBKryLk29E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRBKryLk29E As you'll hear it's pretty removed from conventional rhythm, harmony, and form. There are certainly underlying foundations, but they've transitioned into a mode that's almost entirely rhythm and timbre. In fact, by leaning into the generative components and ignoring the need to replicate traditional song forms, melody, or cadence in a credible way they've pioneered a very radical and exciting form of composition with electronic instruments.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
> I’ve been actively making music full time for a good 15 years now. I work as a writer/producer and despite all of my experience and theoretical understanding I’d probably be hard pressed to come up with a way to algorithmically describe my musical instincts in a way that generates satisfying music. > I think a large part of the trouble comes from the notion that most music requires a certain degree of subversion of expectation. And not randomly selected subversions either. Deliberate choices that feel meaningful. I could spend a lot of time defining one melodic phrase and immediately need to tweak the rule for the second half or a reharmonization. Not to mention rhythmic cadences and groove. I mean this in the kindest way but... you’re right. You should not seed generated music algorithms. You’re describing something people feel viscerally as something mechanical. I don’t know if that’s how you experience music but... it’s not what most people feel hearing it. And that’s okay.
- Slow_Hand 6y ago
  Ha. I'm not sure that I understand exactly what you think I'm right about or why that requires you to gently explain it as a good thing. But thank you? I don't think that there's anything fundamentally objectionable about generating music algorithmically. It just tends to be disappointing and not as engaging as more traditional forms of composition at this moment in time. I'm sure it'll be really exciting once it matures. I like Brian Eno's idea of records someday being programs that you purchase instead of recordings that are frozen in time. Something that you can play and hear a different version every time that it generates. In theory that sounds really lovely. Sometimes I do think of music as something mechanical, or procedural. A lot of artists do stuff like this with pleasing results. Steve Reich's 'Come Out', 'It's Gonna Rain', or 'Clapping Music' are prominent examples for me. Granted, those three pieces probably resonate more with the academically and musically nerdy types, but they're powerful if you keep an open mind going in and submit to it. But right now I think the most compelling generated stuff still has an element of human input to steer it's development and isn't quite ready to run on it's own. I think some of the most interesting stuff today is music that's composed by hand but borrows the affect of procedural music. Stuff like minimal techno that evolves very slowly. I'm particularly fond of the work of Ricardo Villalobos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZWdWzMdndc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZWdWzMdndc
ttjjtt 6y ago
Do you mind sharing some of your music?
- Slow_Hand 6y ago
  I'd be happy to email you a track or two. I'd want to share recent work, but it's also unreleased so I'd like to not have it be made public until it's complete.
  - ttjjtt 6y ago
    Nice, my emails up now. Likewise I’ll send something in return, but there’s no obligation to provide feedback
bambax 6y ago
Experimenting with generative music I put together an extremely simple (and ugly) prototype that only uses random generation (no machine learning of any kind) and very few rules; it is very basic but can sometimes produce things that could pass for elevator music. For example (with some imagination) this could be the background music in a Chinese restaurant (because of the pentatonic scale): http://autopedie.medusis.com/#011004155|g113220|g213410|c114220 http://autopedie.medusis.com/#011004155|g113220|g213410|c114... What are missing are repetitions (see the other thread by MauranKilom) and some kind of structure. But as a minimalist experiment it's fun.
- romwell 6y ago
  It's a fun experiment, but I feel like my cat walking across the piano produces more musical results due to the presence of intent. Music, like all art, is communication. Randomly generated communication is just noise. The intent in this exhibit seems to be "this is what these rules sound like", but then it's the generator itself that is the artwork.
  - bambax 6y ago
    Your cat walking across the piano certainly doesn't follow scales, and probably not tempo either. But yes, the more rules there are, the more "musical" it can sound.
    - vbsteven 6y ago
      It could if it avoided all the black keys.
rorykoehler 6y ago
>The duo is notorious for using self-built tools that algorithmically generate the sounds, texture, and rhythms. I didn't know that about them but now their music makes much more sense to me.
- spacemanmatt 6y ago
  I was noting this exact thing while watching Township Rebellion mix music live that they produced in the studio.

scsilver 6y ago

I produce music aswell. I think some genres like techno could have procedurally generated tracks, that could be then brought to an artistic level by a dj mix of those tracks. The dj would provide that needed subversion and unpredictability to make it worth listening to.

briankelly 6y ago

I'm just a hobbyist but I play guitar and am getting more into production (drum machines, synths, sequencing multi-sampled instruments, etc.) Recording my guitar gives me an appreciation for the fact that as great as virtual instruments are, there is still so much left on the table that a good instrumentalist (let alone a vocalist) is doing and often not even thinking about it. There's much more to it than playing the right notes at the right times if you want it to sound right, much less good. Stuff like the Linnstrument is taking it to higher levels, but I think the horizon for Faux-y Bonnamosa is a little further out than some in the tech crowds might imagine. The bar might seem a little lower for pure electronic genres but it'll still be some time before Steve Faoki is consistently better than the real deal.

djeiasbsbo 6y ago
Well, playing and recording a live instrument is much more expressive for many reasons. But the biggest thing are these little random bits and noises that can be present when recording with a microphone and inconsistencies such as pitch fluctuations. This can be emulated with soft synths and samplers but with many limitations. When I produce music digitally, I usually get the most interesting results by randomising devices. For example, in Ableton Live there is a device called "Device Randomiser" that can randomise other devices. A few of these in a chain can produce crazy sounds over time. Then these can be used together with more traditional soft synths, for example by using them as an external vocoder signal.

Igelau 6y ago

> most music requires a certain degree of subversion of expectation And that's usually a really small amount within the confines of "what works".

megameter 6y ago

I've started down the same path that Autechre has gone recently - just using Sonic Pi as the live-looper to build up a library of part-players and a conductor. Then output MIDI to a DAW to use plugins and make further arrangement and mix decisions. The thing is, the sound design is, in a sense, the easy part. You can buy the sound you want, with the substantial exception of some acoustic and vocal performances. You can feed it into a tremendous number of processing effects and get artistically interesting results by turning the knobs. This has been commodified: you can buy up software bundles for holiday sales right now and have an absolutely vast kit of professional production tools for perhaps $500 USD; less, going to zero, if you focus just on essentials and make good use of freebies, more if you aim for high-effort multisampled instruments and certain high-end plugins. And so we have a golden age for the improvisational electronic jam session. There's no need to build your own patches, though it helps from a sound engineering perspective to have those skills. But compositions aren't jam sessions, they're a tighter, more directed layer of structure than that. And the problem that rears its head with algorithmic approaches is that it isn't reducable to one algorithm with different values, rather, a different piece is a different algorithm, and the final result is assembled most easily by switching between layers of intentional, hand-picked sequences and automations that extend upon them. But if you go in agnostic to the principles driving that material, as it seems the author did, the result doesn't go in any coherent direction, and so it doesn't sound musical. Many people like the old chiptunes on the C64. One of the distinguishing features of many of them is the fact that the sequences are, in fact, algorithmic in this way. They were not composed entirely on the piano and then painstakingly input as a sequence of events. Some were, of course, but memory constraints drove many more towards compression, if only at the level of "loop this pattern", and the lengthiest tunes leaned heavily on algorithms(one example: Times of Lore). There is no requirement for algorithmic approaches to also be academic experiments and these tunes often demonstrate that. Somehow this fact gets very little representation in the modern DAW environment. Sequences are uniformly multitrack tapes, printed scores, piano rolls, tracker grids, or lists of events. If they're particularly cheeky they might think to use divisions of a circle. But you can define an interesting sequence in a few lines of code, really: you just need to tap into a pattern that has some intrinsic chaos(predictable, but in a difficult-to-compute way - cellular automata, double pendulums, fractals or even just a polyrhythm all work) and subsequently shape it to the needs of the larger structure. It's the use of the mathematics that matters, and traditional theory is kind of burdensome in this way, because it often obscures the mathematics in trying to convert it into something that can be muscle-memory trained and called out verbally.

tessierashpool 6y ago

Algorithmic music has a history stretching back at least as far as Mozart. His algorithmic music sounded good. His non-algorithmic music sounded good too. Not a coincidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel

Slow_Hand 6y ago
I'd be curious to know how tightly Mozart would have stuck to the outcomes that the dice dealt him. I could imagine him also using the dice as a jumping off point for compositional suggestion but disobeying the dice for a round if he wanted to follow an idea in a different direction. Because he could hear the composition as it was being generated, I can just as easily imagine him deviating from the dice-scheme if he saw an opportunity for something interesting. Who knows. A similar thing happens in Schoenberg's twelve-tone system. For melodic writing, the composer is locked into using the next pitch in their tone-row, but the art of it comes in them exercising their ability to repeat that prescribed pitch or change it's register however they see fit to get the best possible musical effect. It's quasi-algorithmic in that the pitch sequence is prescribed, but the writer is allowed to get creative with the other musical dimensions to make it as compelling as possible. That said, it generally doesn't make for very enjoyable listening. At least, it's an acquired taste. 20th century classical music got pretty far up it's ass with the "games for games-sake".
- tessierashpool 6y ago
  Mozart was not rolling the dice. Mozart created the melodic fragments; people who bought the sheet music got instructions to roll their dice to combine the fragments into new melodies.

grawprog 6y ago

Hmm, i play and make music, but i can see a place for randomly generated music, or at least randomly generated music as a tool for creation. But, like with a lot of randomly generated video games, it's easy to make them suck. I think something maybe more like A robot named fight's approach to procedural generation may be better for music, random generation based on pre-assembled parts, or maybe random generation to create variation for pre written parts. A lot of arpeggiators already do something similar. Though, i do agree with the general premise of that and think any randomly generated parts should be hand touched up by someone who knows what they're doing and should be used as any other tool in a musician's arsenal and not as a way to just generate songs wholesale. There is a potential for random generation to be used creatively in music, it just shouldn't be used as a crutch to cover lack of skill or as the sole means by which a song is created.

Slow_Hand 6y ago
Well for the band in question, Autechre, I'm not trying to suggest that they compose by having the machines generate parts and then they go back to tweak those parts. It's more as though the program they write for a composition is something to be steered and actively adjusted on the fly. THAT's the performance. They're not micro-managing note and rhythm choice. They're performing by adjusting probabilities, or adding new seed conditions on the fly, or controlling meta functions. I believe their compositional style is more akin to a long form improvisational jam that may then be edited down for conciseness and redundancy. I don't get the impression that they're going back and tweaking the fine details at this stage in their long career. They're way too prolific to keep that up. Here's an example of some tracks that are typical of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMD_oenMGVk&list=OLAK5uy_lvgLLXuJvmlSA-QH0-R95CzhYx00aRnJM&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMD_oenMGVk&list=OLAK5uy_lvg... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRBKryLk29E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRBKryLk29E As you'll hear it's pretty removed from conventional rhythm, harmony, and form. There are certainly underlying foundations, but they've transitioned into a mode that's almost entirely rhythm and timbre. In fact, by leaning into the generative components and ignoring the need to replicate traditional song forms, melody, or cadence in a credible way they've pioneered a very radical and exciting form of composition with electronic instruments.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

> I’ve been actively making music full time for a good 15 years now. I work as a writer/producer and despite all of my experience and theoretical understanding I’d probably be hard pressed to come up with a way to algorithmically describe my musical instincts in a way that generates satisfying music. > I think a large part of the trouble comes from the notion that most music requires a certain degree of subversion of expectation. And not randomly selected subversions either. Deliberate choices that feel meaningful. I could spend a lot of time defining one melodic phrase and immediately need to tweak the rule for the second half or a reharmonization. Not to mention rhythmic cadences and groove. I mean this in the kindest way but... you’re right. You should not seed generated music algorithms. You’re describing something people feel viscerally as something mechanical. I don’t know if that’s how you experience music but... it’s not what most people feel hearing it. And that’s okay.

Slow_Hand 6y ago
Ha. I'm not sure that I understand exactly what you think I'm right about or why that requires you to gently explain it as a good thing. But thank you? I don't think that there's anything fundamentally objectionable about generating music algorithmically. It just tends to be disappointing and not as engaging as more traditional forms of composition at this moment in time. I'm sure it'll be really exciting once it matures. I like Brian Eno's idea of records someday being programs that you purchase instead of recordings that are frozen in time. Something that you can play and hear a different version every time that it generates. In theory that sounds really lovely. Sometimes I do think of music as something mechanical, or procedural. A lot of artists do stuff like this with pleasing results. Steve Reich's 'Come Out', 'It's Gonna Rain', or 'Clapping Music' are prominent examples for me. Granted, those three pieces probably resonate more with the academically and musically nerdy types, but they're powerful if you keep an open mind going in and submit to it. But right now I think the most compelling generated stuff still has an element of human input to steer it's development and isn't quite ready to run on it's own. I think some of the most interesting stuff today is music that's composed by hand but borrows the affect of procedural music. Stuff like minimal techno that evolves very slowly. I'm particularly fond of the work of Ricardo Villalobos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZWdWzMdndc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZWdWzMdndc

ttjjtt 6y ago

Do you mind sharing some of your music?

Slow_Hand 6y ago
I'd be happy to email you a track or two. I'd want to share recent work, but it's also unreleased so I'd like to not have it be made public until it's complete.
- ttjjtt 6y ago
  Nice, my emails up now. Likewise I’ll send something in return, but there’s no obligation to provide feedback

bambax 6y ago

Experimenting with generative music I put together an extremely simple (and ugly) prototype that only uses random generation (no machine learning of any kind) and very few rules; it is very basic but can sometimes produce things that could pass for elevator music. For example (with some imagination) this could be the background music in a Chinese restaurant (because of the pentatonic scale): http://autopedie.medusis.com/#011004155|g113220|g213410|c114220 http://autopedie.medusis.com/#011004155|g113220|g213410|c114... What are missing are repetitions (see the other thread by MauranKilom) and some kind of structure. But as a minimalist experiment it's fun.

romwell 6y ago
It's a fun experiment, but I feel like my cat walking across the piano produces more musical results due to the presence of intent. Music, like all art, is communication. Randomly generated communication is just noise. The intent in this exhibit seems to be "this is what these rules sound like", but then it's the generator itself that is the artwork.
- bambax 6y ago
  Your cat walking across the piano certainly doesn't follow scales, and probably not tempo either. But yes, the more rules there are, the more "musical" it can sound.
  - vbsteven 6y ago
    It could if it avoided all the black keys.

rorykoehler 6y ago

>The duo is notorious for using self-built tools that algorithmically generate the sounds, texture, and rhythms. I didn't know that about them but now their music makes much more sense to me.

spacemanmatt 6y ago
I was noting this exact thing while watching Township Rebellion mix music live that they produced in the studio.