Tag Archives: generative

thinking aloud: listening and making generative music

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Why just listen to generative music when you can easily make your own…1

It strikes me that because Generative music is likely different every time it is listened to, the act of listening to it can be accorded the role of creating that particular piece every time, therefore putting listening on a par with making, or even demoting listening as a role for the audience – maybe listening becomes “active,” listening as part of the generative process.

Generative music is the the most adaptable of “live” music – in that it’s always new, always different, no matter if it is a public or private situation, and it’s dependence on mechanical reproduction allows it the portability that “traditional” live music lacks. In terms of community experience, that particular version of the piece could be a shared experienced, in a live performance with an audience, but on a one to one basis it never has the potential to be communal, or shared – every launch of the piece occasions a new version, and unless it is hard coded as a static file cannot be transferred. But hard coding as a static file destroys the nature of the piece as generative.

One might ask what meaning it has if it is always different – where is the piece? This seems an inappropriate clinging onto outmoded forms, given the nature of generative systems, a paradigm for music (and indeed art in general) that may be difficult to maintain. If one must reduce it to such a thing one can look at it from two sides (maybe more). The meaning, the piece, is the method by which the piece is generated, the system, the order, the algorithm. Or, as I suggested above, the meaning is in the reception, but in a very fugitive sense. Static recordings can only be examples, maybe representing practical methods of revenue generation or dissemination, as in the production of documentation for ephemeral works by artists.

UPDATE: Coincidentally, Robin Peckham just posted a link to a piece by Nick Seaver, at the Comparative Media Studies department of MIT, where “he is studying indeterminacy and control in sound transmission, the role of ‘skill’ in aesthetic judgments, and the history of automatic musical instruments.” Nick posted a piece yesterday on his blog, noise for airports, about his research into the Player Piano. He makes an interesting point about “live” music, and its interpretation where the player piano is involved. This definitely relates to my notes above trying to define the “piece” where generative music is concerned:

“Live” music as we think of it today didn’t exist before audio recording—it was impossible for a sound to not be live. The player piano makes things a bit more complicated: is it still live if the notes are all punched on a roll in advance but “interpreted” by a live pianolist? Advertisements showing the ghostly hands of famous pianists on the keys suggested perfect fidelity: the parts of your piano would move exactly how they did when Rachmaninoff or Paderewski played. Would this recording, played on an actual piano, count as “live?” 2

Player Pianos were also an important instrument for the American composer Conlon Nancarrow, who wrote extremely complex pieces using punched paper rolls, pushing the machines to their limits and beyond the limits of the human ear. Sound and performance artist Michael Yuen tells me that:

Nancarrow had to specially alter his player pianos. they were fitted with vacuums to suck air out quicker. There are times when his music calls for 25 notes per sec. That’s a note every 40 msec. The ear can only hear a difference at best at 20msec. Without the turbo charged pianolas, the mechanism pulling the air couldn’t move the hammers and notes go missing. 3

I’d be interested to find out if these machines were popular in China, and if musical production of this sort has influenced the current generations of artists and musicians?

  1. Intermorphic (2010) Mixtikl 2: THE Generative Music & Loop Mixing System. [Online]. Available from:
    http://www.intermorphic.com/ [Accessed 5 March 2010].
  2. Seaver, Nick (2010) OLD MEDIA: INTERACTIVITY AND MECHANICAL MUSIC. noise for airports. Weblog. [Online] Available from: http://noiseforairports.com/post/426858290/old-media-interactivity-and-mechanical-music [Accessed 5 March 2010].
  3. Yuen, Michael (michael.yuen@internode.on.net) (10 February 2010) Re: generative v. hand-crafted. Email to: Sanderson, Edward (cpupro.art@gmail.com).

Auto-generative and auto-destructive music

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This afternoon UCCA hosted a rather inspiring music event organised by Yan Jun’s Subjam label, including a collaboration between Wu Na 巫娜, on Guqin1, and Zhang Jian 张荐 (one-half of FM3) on a set of seven Buddha Machines2, after which American composer William Basinski 威廉•巴辛斯基 and film-maker James Elaine 詹姆斯•伊莱恩 took over for drones and tape loops, set against scenes of water surfaces intersected with branches forming shapes, in subtly shifting hues of gold.

Conceptually these two duos formed a nice counterpoint in terms of techniques and results. Wu Na and Zhang Jian represented for me an additive process, Zhang’s manipulation of the Buddha Machines producing waves of layered sound, it’s effects occurring through the cycle of sync and de-sync of the individual loops. Most of the time sitting back in his chair studying the hanging Machines and the sounds they were producing, every now and then he would rise up and put one to his ear, selecting a loop and adjusting the pitch to add to the mix, or make subtle changes to the existing setup. These changes initiated active systems between the set of Machines, gradually progressing through possible variations, intermittently adjusted by further tweaks to the dials. The Machines began at a low pitch and at first Wu Na’s playing added harsh interruptions to their flow, the absolute temporal fixity of the plucking of the giqan cutting through the smooth, endlessness of the loops. But as the Machines rose in volume the strings began to bleed into the systems, the highlights of bright picked sequences becoming aligned with the loops to eventually flow with them.

Willian Basinski, on the other hand, set up a spectacle with his loops with definite end-points, the consistent drone punctuated by ageing stretches of tape. Selecting a length of tape from his metal cookie box, inspecting it under the USB light attached to the computer which synthesised the drone, Basinski threads the selected length onto the spools of the obsolete deck which he has tracked down, wedging a spare beer bottle to take up the slack in the loop. The loop’s sound is mixed into the drone to create a series of vignettes of sound from each loop. I didn’t make the connection until afterwards, but I had already heard some of Basinski Disintegration Loops series before, a precursor to this method, recordings of his old archive loops gradually wearing out as the tape is dragged across the playhead – the sound of the destruction of the medium overlapping and eventually replacing the recorded content.

I tend to see William Basinski’s sounds as subtractive in their construction (destruction) of the music, or a process of negation, a stripping over time of the body, flaying the sounds into other forms. Zhang Jian and Wu Na seem to work in a process of addition, adding together to form the result. Loops which technically hold infinity in their structure, for Zhang and Wu form a continuum over which they can play, but for Basinski this continuum surrenders to its physical form’s frailties.

  1. 古琴: A seven-string Chinese musical instrument of the Zither family.
  2. 貝佛: A small mass-produced loop player, developed by Zhang Jian and Christiaan Virant (FM3).