Never happy with anything I might write, I've reworked the introduction
and updated it in the wiki. I hope it's an improvement! I think
through these paragraphs I'm aiming to slowly bring people from the
over-exposed ideas of Eno et al, to our more interactive approach. Is
that a worthwhile aim?
There are many comparisions to be made between software and music.
For example, both exist as a set of instructions to be interpreted and
executed to produce a temporal form. I play this music I've scored, I
run this software I've hacked together; I breathe life into my work.
Indeed, some musicians explore their ideas as software processes,
often to the point that a software becomes the essence of the music.
At this point, the musicians may also be thought of as programmers
exploring their code manifested as sound. This does not reduce their
primary role as a musician, but complements it, with unique
perspective on the composition of their music.
Terms such as "generative music" and "processor music" have been
invented and appropriated to describe this new perspective on
composition. Much is made of the alleged properties of so called
"generative music" that separate the composer from the resulting work.
Brian Eno likens making generative music to sowing seeds that are left
to grow. Much is made of how we may give up control to our processes,
leaving them to "play in the wind." This is only one approach to
combining software with music, one that this paper wishes to counter
quite strongly. We advocate the humanisation of generative music,
where code isn't left alone to meander through its self-describing
soundscape, but is hacked together, chopped up and moulded to
make live music.
Received on Sun May 16 2004 - 10:41:30 BST