Diff'rent strokes: Brian Eno

A  Monday read featuring excerpts from articles on Culture, Art, Music, Film, Books, Architecture and various pop and avant-garde creations.

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Brian Eno on music that thinks for itself

Wired Magazine

When you think about it, recorded music is something of a historical oddity. Imagine telling a visitor from 1650 that we like to listen to the exact same performances, over and over again, without any variation -- they might well be baffled. Or, as Brian Eno once said, perhaps it is our grandchildren who will be the baffled ones.

Scape, a musical app developed by Eno alongside composer and programmer Peter Chilvers, is a kind of album that will never sound the same twice. It's a continuation of Eno's work with generative music, compositions which change every time they're played as the systems behind them introduce some kind of randomness. Starting with an empty screen, shapes can be arranged to create literal "soundscapes" where they each represent a different sound. Their positions relative to each other dictate their behaviour.

Eno, one of popular music's most important and influential figures, has used generative techniques to compose music for many years, popularizing the term with the album Generative Music 1 in 1996. Chilvers and Eno first worked together on the soundtrack to Spore, where the generative music matched the sandbox evolution of the gameplay. They then worked together on apps called Trope and Bloom, both more primitive versions of the "soundscape" idea behind Scape.

We're used to the ideas of live music versus recorded music, and the different expectations they bring, but generative music introduces the unpredictability of live playing to machines. The description of Scape as "music that thinks for itself" imbues computers with a kind of creative responsibility, which might seem a contentious notion. Can an algorithm be creative in a way that we would recognize?

Wired.co.uk met with Eno and Chilvers at Eno's studio in Notting Hill to discuss the development of Scape, and what it means for the future of generative music as a popular art form.

Wired.co.uk: You two have worked together before on similar apps, but this seems a much more elaborate setup -- to what extent is this a progression of those same ideas?

Eno: They're progressions from Spore, where we wanted to make music that wasn't repetitive or based on simple loops going around, but was based on the idea that any scene could have a sonic character -- but it wouldn't be exactly the same each time you visited. So we came up with this idea of loading the game with what we called "shufflers" -- now they're called "elements". There were simple rules for how those things combined and played out -- this thing only happens when these other two things are happening -- and so on. This worked quite well in Spore, and Bloom was one of the spinoffs from that. Bloom used one sound that we used in Spore. I think it was a big step forward, actually, that you could create a piece of art and not just an interesting technical curiosity. [Scape] is another step, to say, "what if we used a bigger family of elements?"

So where do you come up with those different elements, and how they interact with each other?

Chilvers: A lot of the sounds came out of a mixture of existing pieces by Brian, so there was already an existing combination that would sit well together. I think it's partly down to the nature of the kind of music that Brian has been creating that they actually sit well with most sounds in this universe.

Eno: That's right, it's a kind of universe of sounds that work well together, and they can have quite ambiguous tonal relations with each other. You couldn't imagine doing this if you took apart, say, a Clash album, and you took apart the drum parts, and the guitar parts, and the bass parts, and let them float freely and recombine. It probably wouldn't get you a very interesting result. But this music was made from the beginning in that way. It was made on the idea that the elements within it were not in a fixed relationship to each other, they didn't have to be in just one relationship. The discovery that we made was that you could take three or four of those elements from one piece and three or four from another piece and -- ah! -- they can work together. It's been treated like a composition process from the beginning really.

I've seen you talk about it generating its own compositions -- that it has its own creativity. Do you think that a machine can generate real music without human input that we would still value?

Eno: It's not without human input.

Chilvers: It's not realtime human input, I suppose. To come back to a metaphor that Brian often uses, it's more like gardening; we're providing a set of seeds more than anything else, but those seeds were already designed elsewhere and they were already given that initial kickstart of creativity there. It's a very unusual type of creativity, it's quite open-ended.

The interface adds to that. I don't want to call it messy, but it's not rigid. You can place things wherever you want. That's very deliberate I imagine?

Chilvers: In fact it's something I found slightly alien. We actually bent the rules slightly so you can place things just off the screen, so they're just spilling out over the edge.

Eno: It also gives you a different way into the composing process because you can compose a piece just by making a picture that you like, which I find quite interesting.

Chilvers: There's an interesting example of that actually. If I just load the very first one, "Icon", the name isn't a coincidence. We have a graphic designer, and he wanted some sort of suggestion of what the icon for the app would look like, so I mocked something up with Scape. All I was trying to do was get one of each type of element, and by the end of it we thought "that's a really nice piece". So it ended up becoming the opening. So this is a great example of something with no real sense of what the sound will be, just trying to do it naturally.

It's almost like a 21st century version of Oramics isn't it?

Both: [Laughter] Yes, yes.

Read more here.

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All things must pass

We should not seek immortality in reproduction. But if you contribute to the world`s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a spark plug, write a poem, 

it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool.

                                                           Richard Dawkins

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is anemeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the Universityof Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982, he introduced into evolutionary biology the influential concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms; this concept is presented in his book, The Extended Phenotype.

Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. 

He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief". As of January 2010, the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.

Read more here.

Images taken at Paco Park, Manila

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Shadow Shot Sunday2

Please note:

I very much appreciate my articles and photos appearing on fellow bloggers' sites, popular broadsheets, and local broadcast news segments, but I would appreciate even more a request for permission first.

Thank you!

Dong, where's the music?

Whenever I travel to new places, once settled, I begin to search for certain things.  Among which is the music distinctly inherent to the region that warms yet exalts the collective soul of the natives, so to speak.

In old San Juan, during the late afternoons, you start to hear salsa being performed with such electrifying fervor by the locals that it makes you want to dance right there on the street.  They do not do it to solicit some loose change from passersby.  They do it as a way to recharge their mind and spirit after a hard day’s work; perhaps, with the help of some Bacardi.  Such merry-making, especially on weekends, can extend to the late nights.  I can only assume the same thing happens in Havana, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, and other Caribbean cities and townships.

You can imagine my disappointment, therefore, when after some months, the local music of Bohol remains elusive.  What I hear often are out of tune ballads belted out by some drunken karaoke barflies; imported love songs beautifully rendered by acoustic bands along Alona Beach; and bossa nova as ambient music at various establishments. 

Speaking of which, bossa nova gets played so much around here – even at the buy-one-take-one burger joint along the highway.  Its popularity would certainly make Jobim proud, but its dominance of the airwaves makes me wonder if there’s any underground Brazilian society around here, which controls the minds of the populace.  If there were any, I’d like to check it out because I used to hang out with a bunch of dazed and confused, though fun-loving Brazilian expats in Manhattan.  In addition, I took percussion lessons from Nana Vasconcelos one summer in New York City.

Yes, I took serious music lessons for more than four years.  I term it serious not because I attended Julliard, but I paid serious money for private music lessons just to demystify the mechanics of music for self-edification.  In the process, with the advent of wondrous technology – synthesizers, drum machines, personal computers and sequencers – I learned all about playing the keyboard, as well as the craft of music composition, arrangement, and orchestration. 

I subsequently profited from such endeavor when some New York friends – artists and musicians – hooked me up with gigs creating background music for TV commercials and industrial videos.  This enabled me to become a member of BMI and the American Guild of Authors and Composers since I started earning royalties from my works.

I also had a great record collection amassed during my earlier 3-year stint as an assistant to the VP of merchandising of a record distribution company in Long Island City.  I practically received a promotional copy of every record released by the major and independent labels – of various genres from classical to punk rock.  Again, through the auspices of friends and by making use of my record collection, I accepted additional lucrative projects, such as programming music for a couple of trendy, upscale Manhattan restaurants and helping some Seventh Avenue couture houses select appropriate music for their showrooms and runway shows.  And I still managed to keep my day job.

The highlight of it all was when I was sought out and recruited as a paralegal by the prestigious intellectual property law firm, Fish & Neave.  I was to become a member of its defense team for one of its clients, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic (WEA), a major force in the American music industry.  It was sued along with all American and European record companies by a French conglomerate, S.A. Thompson, for copyright infringement that involved the compact disc technology.  Except for WEA and a medium-sized compact disc manufacturer in Chicago, all parties acquiesced and began settlement dialogues with the plaintiff.  On the other hand, we worked even harder and ultimately won the case, much to the delight of all defendants!

Going back to the matter at hand – my search for the local Bohol music – the gods must have finally taken pity on me, because last Sunday, during mass at the Cathedral of St. Joseph, I was suddenly enthralled by the hymns being sung by the priest, choir and parishioners.  The lyrics were in Visayan, while the melodies were incredibly transporting.  Like Puccini’s arias, I need not comprehend the lyrics. I simply had to close my eyes and immerse myself in such sublime experience at that very moment.  Indeed, I was feeling exhilarated by the time I exited the church. 

When I mentioned this to some local friends later on, they immediately recommended that I check out the live performances at the Loboc Children’s Choir Theater.  They also suggested that I attend mass at the St. Augustin Parish Church in Panglao Island for its music.  And without missing a beat, I replied, “I most definitely will!”

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Please note:

I very much appreciate my articles and photos appearing on fellow bloggers' sites, popular broadsheets, and local broadcast news segments, but I would appreciate even more a request for permission first.

Thank you!

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