Tag Archives: generative music

Bucephalus for iOS Lets You Experiment With Physics-Based Generative Music

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bucephalusDeveloper Refined Stochastic Technology has released Bucephalus for iOS – a free app that lets you experiment with physics-based generative music.

Features:

  • Five ball sizes controlled globally
  • Variable hardness and resonance
  • Add up to 20 balls (6 on slower processors)

Additional features (available via in-app purchase):

  • Custom designed three stage, four parameter chamber reverb
  • Two parameter custom distortion
  • Three filter types with adjustable Q and cutoff frequency
  • Save states
  • Variable elasticity, gravity and resonance
  • User defined resonance settings with Major7, Minor7, Dominant7, Semitone, Wholetone and Pentatonic arpeggios and variable detuning for microtonal effects

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Can A Sequencer Replace Formulaic Dance Music Artists?

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computer-generated-trance-music

Mungo Enterprises - creator of the State Zero polyphonic modular synthesizer – created this unique sequencer, Infinite Horizon, that is designed to generate electronic dance music on the fly:

The basic concept behind it is that most “classic” dance music is so formulaic it should be easy for a computer to generate. Generating all patterns and sequences from a small set of rules the unit is able to deliver new and original tracks in realtime.

The original implementation ran autonomously but the tracks lacked the (often criticized as predictable) build up/down structure so critical in forming a flow. Rather than trying to implement such a complex concept in such a simple and elegant piece of code I decided this task should be performed by a human.

Here’s what it sounds like using a trance sound set:

First Live Dump Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Brian Eno’s Scape Asks ‘Can Machines Create Original Music?’

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Opal has released Scape - a new generative music application, created by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers.

Here’s what they have to say about Scape:

Scape is a new form of album which offers users deep access to its musical elements. These can be endlessly recombined to behave intelligently: reacting to each other, changing mood together, making new sonic spaces.

Can machines create original music? Scape is our answer to that question: it employs some of the sounds, processes and compositional rules that we have been using for many years and applies them in fresh combinations, to create new music. Scape makes music that thinks for itself.

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Variations II Of Variations II

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Reader Jay Kim sent word of a new audiovisual installation, inspired by John Cage:

Variations II of Variations II is a kinetic sculpture inspired by John Cage’s Variations series.

Cage?s Variations II is a graphical composition that generates musical events using measurements of distance between dots and lines on a piece of paper.

In my realization of Variations II, the instructions for the piece determine the behavior of rotating panels and images synchronized to be projected onto the sculpture. Motors drive the rotation of the panels, and are used as a sound source for the audio portion of this piece.