Australians making music with computer code

They either have a very shallow understanding ("I made an image" = "I made art"; "I played some samples in a browser or trained a GAN" = "I made music") or they have an academic misunderstanding, based on a decent technical understanding of the grammars of the medium, but limited insight into how creative originators can use grammars expressively.

There are exceptions, especially in visuals, so you have a point about Sturgeon's Law. But there are still far too many people treating generative media as a technical exercise, and too few using them for impressive original creativity.

I am myself mostly familiar with visual generative and algorithmic art. I recently looked up the difference between these two and it's somewhat relevant:

Generative art is when an autonomous system that is not the artist takes part in or is used for the creation. Usually these are people with an art background. But very often, the art doesn't look that intriguing visually, because that is mostly carried by the concept of how it was made.

For instance. You can hook up a plant to an Arduino and some motors that control a brush. Now it's a painting plant. But the paintings will be rubbish. However, now you move the plant with sensors to one coast, and the motor control paintbrush setup 5000mi away on the other coast. Now there's an extra layer of depth to the piece, call it "non-local distributed agent control" or something. The painting will still be rubbish, but now there's something extra cool to the story/process, which is part of generative art.

This is why I very much dislike peopling calling their work "Untitled 2736" with no other explanation. If you have the above thing, but you only see the display output painting titled "Plant Study 663" then what is the audience supposed to think about it? No you put a little plaque next to it with the story of what you did, at least. I was in MoMa NYC years ago and it didn't do this, so I really only enjoyed the pieces that I recognized from being famous, or the ones that happened to look pretty. Other contemporary art museums that I visited did it much better and provided info, I had a much better time.

Point is, generative art is not always pretty or pleasing, because it doesn't specifically set out to be.

Algorithmic art seems to originate from the old school computer hobbyist scene, people using the computer to draw fractals, geometric shapes, etc. At first mostly because they were cool things you could make a computer do. Over time, this grew into more professional art as well.

Difference is, algorithmic art often sets out to be pretty. It's just that you use algorithms as brushes, preferably creating things that you couldn't come up with otherwise. I'm going to talk about these on the visual medium first because that's what I'm most familiar with.

Problem is, algorithmic art seems to have a bit of a soft divide between people with an art or design background that can somewhat code, and the computer coders with not too much design sensibility. The overlap is of course where the magic happens.

On the "art side", their work often looks very nice, but sometimes it lacks the algorithmic depth to take it to the next level, or come up with something original. What I see often is that a specific routine, say a cool wiggly way to draw a line (instead of a boring regular line), gets used over and over again in different works that use lines. It's a bit like you made a custom photoshop brush. What you sometimes get is an algorithmic work that is the combination of a bunch of "shallow" algorithms, but nothing really "new". It's difficult because you really need a solid math or computational science background.

On the "code side", you get all these toy examples of amazing algorithms. But their creations are picked to showcase as many modes of operation. And the colours will be white/black/blue/red. Or it will be rainbow puke because they used HSL/HSV too enthusiastically. The focus point of the work will be centered on the screen without much thought if it might look nicer any other way. Without too much background in traditional arts, they will not recognize a known path and how to execute it well (because history) or at least choose not to. Say what you made, just happens to remind a bit of Gustav Klimt. Maybe there were random colours and some happened to be shades of gold. Now you can choose: will you try and incorporate other elements of Klimt's style, or perhaps some Jugendstil aesthetics, to really nail it down. Or is that exactly not what you want and you recognize it so you can steer away from it.

Please note that all what I just wrote is very subjective to my understanding of generative and algorithmic art (corrections are very welcome). Also the "typical" examples I stated are of course caricatures to demonstrate a point. Most people will be a more moderate mixture of these.

Finally, about the musical examples in the article, I'm getting a similar vibe. I can't really say if it's the "code" or the "art" side doing this. What I'm hearing in especially the melodies is my own first experiences trying to write a random music generator. It's what you get if you pick notes randomly from a chord or a scale. Broadly, it doesn't take in enough context from itself and the rest of the music. The rhythmical aspect of melody, the importance of accent notes and phrase-ending notes, are usually ignored. Also larger structures like ABAC are constraints that actually add depth. But picking notes randomly from a chord or scale is a one-liner and thus great for live coding. Unfortunately the naive approach will always have this vibe of "the notes are not wrong, but they are very random" and different melodies generated will blend into each other because they are formed of the same mush.

Again, very very subjective opinions, and I'd love to hear how others see these things :)