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
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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