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Fractal and Generative Art
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| Brian Eno on Generative Art |
[Aug. 20th, 2005|02:04 am] |
Part I
"One of my long-term interests has been the invention of 'machines' and 'systems' that could produce musical and visual experiences. Most often these 'machines' were more conceptual than physical: the point of them was to make music with materials and processes I specified, but in combinations and interactions that I did not.
My first released piece of this kind was 'Discreet Music' (1975), in which two simple melodic cycles of different durations separately repeat and are allowed to overlay each other arbitrarily. (Thus, for instance, if one cycle is 29 seconds long and the other is 33 seconds long, they will come back into sync every 957 (i.e. 29 * 33) seconds. Subsequently I released 'Music For Airports', 'On Land', 'Thursday Afternoon', 'Neroli' and other works, all of which use variations on this and similar 'automatic' systems.
In my audio-visual installations I found another way of making ever-changing music. I distributed the pre-recorded musical elements over several (usually four to eight) audio cassettes of different lengths. These were all played back simultaneously, each cassette feeding its own amplifier and pair of speakers. It was thus possible to make music that was different at any point in space and time- or effectively so, because in fact the cassettes would have come into sync again after a few years, if any of the shows had lasted that long (e.g. five cassettes of lengths 23,25.5, 30.2, 19.7 and 21.3 minutes would fall into sync about every 14 years).
I enjoyed these shows- especially the knowledge that the music I was hearing at any given moment was unique, and would probably never be heard in exactly that way again."
From "A Year With Swollen Appendices", page 330 |
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| Brian Eno on Generative Art, Part II |
[Aug. 20th, 2005|10:42 am] |
Part II
"My records, however, were always recordings of the output of one or another of these combinatorial systems: though it could produce original music forever, what went on the record was a 30-minute section of its output, which would then of course be identical each time you played it. However, what I always wanted to do was to sell the system itself, so that a listener would know that the music was always unique. Since this would have involved persuading my listeners to buy four or five CD-players instead of just one, and then to buy the set of four or five CDs to play on them, I didn't spend too much time on the project.
But with computer technology I began to think that there might be a way of doing it. I was inspired initially by certain screensavers- those little graphic devices that use very little computer memory but keep generating new images on the screen. I wrote several proposals based on the idea of using the computer to make music in a similar manner- not as a way of replaying huge chunks of preformed material (which was what was being done, to devastatingly miserable effect, with CD-Roms at the time) but instead as a place where compositional 'seeds' provided by the composer would be grown. I thought this made composing into a kind of genetic activity- in the sense that the compositional 'seeds' were actually interacting sets of rules and parameters rather than precise musical descriptions. I imagined the piece evolving out of the interaction of these probabilistic rule-sets- and therefore evolving differently in each performance.
Since I know nothing about writing code for computers, this would probably have remained a pipedream were it not for a company called Sseyo who had been thinking on exactly the same lines."
From "A Year With Swollen Appendices", pp. 330-1 |
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| LJ Haiku |
[Aug. 20th, 2005|12:51 pm] |
Here are some "haiku" I generated awhile back using a meme that takes phrases from Livejournal entries:
quick enough on the
draw i saw a nice new car
pull out of the world
album all with a
hint of the other flavors
ah the mild smooth buzz
world thousands of years
or more or it could be that
certain defining
this album is kind
of eternal ocean the
tides of ammonia
i suppose is the
sabbath for only certain
folks i can really
It's funny-- I can actually remember most of these entries. . . |
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| Brian Eno on Generative Art, Part III |
[Aug. 20th, 2005|09:41 pm] |
Part III
"In early 1995 I received from them (Sseyo) a CD of music that had been made by their software program called Koan. A couple of the pieces were clearly in 'my' style (they readily acknowledged that my 'ambient' work had been part of their inspiration for the Koan system), but what surprised me was that I would have been proud of them. I contacted Tim Cole at Sseyo, and he arranged for me to get a copy of the Koan 'authoring tool'- the program by which one writes the rules for these pieces- and, after a few days of typical interface frustration, I took to it like a duck to water.
Koan works by addressing the soundcard in the computer. A soundcard is a little synthesizer sold as an optional add-on to the computer. The computer sends instructions to that soundcard and tells it what noises to produce and in what patterns. Koan is a very sophisticated way of doing this, enabling a composer to control about 150 parameters that specify things like sound-timbre and envelope, scale, harmony, rhythm, tempo, vibrato, pitch range, etc. Most of Koan's instructions are probabilistic- so that rather than saying 'Do precisely this' (which is what a musical sequencer does) they say 'Choose what to do from within this range of possibilities.' The Koan program allows that range to be more or less specific- you could, if you so chose, write absolutely precise pieces of music with it, though this would probably be its least interesting use."
From "A Year With Swollen Appendices", p. 331 |
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