Generative Music – Brian Eno (1996) | Hacker News Reader

Generative Music – Brian Eno (1996)

inmotionmagazine.com

95 pointsjmats15 comments

Brian Eno says in the article: "When we think about the process of arguing, we tend to then reconstrue our possibilities in terms of that metaphor. What Lakoff and Johnson say is suppose that somebody had said argument is dance, suppose that was the dominant metaphor. So instead of it being seen you have the process where one person defeats another, it becomes a process where two people together make something beautiful between them. We could have that metaphor for argument, we don't."

Along those lines, consider Dialogue Mapping using IBIS as a way for groups to move beyond competitive argument tearing each other down into cooperative construction of a map of ideas. http://cognexus.org/id41.htm "The icons represent the basic elements of the Dialogue Mapping™ grammar (called IBIS): Questions, Ideas, Pros and Cons."

For a simple notation for IBIS to use without special software, see "Help! I have to think!: An approach to working through life’s big challenges" by KC Burgess Yakemovic.

My favorite Eno essay, which also touches on similar themes, is "Composers as Gardeners".[1]

In the "Generative Music" essay, Eno mentions being influence John Cage. For a closer look at his thought, I highly recommend his book "Silence".[2]

[1] - https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-composers-as-gar...

[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Silence-Lectures-Writings-50th-Annive...

You might also like "The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. One of the ideas there is "Software Development as Gardening". From an interview with the authors (originally from here but it is no longer accessible easily: https://community.oracle.com/docs/DOC-982950 ):

    Bill Venners: In your book, The Pragmatic Programmer, you say, "Rather than construction, programming is more like gardening." I really like your gardening metaphor for software development. Can you elaborate on it?
    Andy Hunt: There is a persistent notion in a lot of literature that software development should be like engineering. First, an architect draws up some great plans. Then you get a flood of warm bodies to come in and fill the chairs, bang out all the code, and you're done. A lot of people still feel that way; I saw an interview in the last six months of a big outsourcing house in India where this was how they felt. They paint a picture of constructing software like buildings. The high talent architects do the design. The coders do the constructing. The tenants move in, and everyone lives happily ever after. We don't think that's very realistic. It doesn't work that way with software.
    We paint a different picture. Instead of that very neat and orderly procession, which doesn't happen even in the real world with buildings, software is much more like gardening. You do plan. You plan that you're going to make a plot this big. You're going to prepare the soil. You bring in a landscape person who says to put the big plants in the back and short ones in the front. You've got a great plan, a whole design.
    But when you plant the bulbs and the seeds, what happens? The garden doesn't quite come up the way you drew the picture. This plant gets a lot bigger than you thought it would. You've got to prune it. You've got to split it. You've got to move it around the garden. This big plant in the back died. You've got to dig it up and throw it into the compost pile. These colors ended up not looking like they did on the package. They don't look good next to each other. You've got to transplant this one over to the other side of the garden.
    Dave Thomas: Also, with a garden, there's a constant assumption of maintenance. Everybody says, I want a low-maintenance garden, but the reality is a garden is something that you're always interacting with to improve or even just keep the same. Although I know there's building maintenance, you typically don't change the shape of a building. It just sits there. We want people to view software as being far more organic, far more malleable, and something that you have to be prepared to interact with to improve all the time.

Anyway, interesting to me to see how the "gardening" theme can apply both to the design (and use) of software to make ambient music and also to the software development process itself.

Eno collaborated with Will Wright to create the generative soundtrack of the video game Spore. Other examples of generative (or procedural) music in games can be found at https://www.reddit.com/r/GameAudio/comments/7iuo85/researchi...

If you want to listen to generative music (not by Brian Eno), check out: https://generative.fm/ (I recommend anything with drone). Not created by me, just a fan

The creator of that references Eno (and his awesome album, Music for Airports) in some of his articles on why he got started

Another fan here, great site and lots of great background music.

This would be about the time when the default startup jingle for Windows 95 was composed by Eno, and possibly being played more times per day in many places than anything else, including lots of popular pop music.

For a few years until people got Windows 98, more people were listening to Eno every day without knowing it than some pop artists had fans.

Really fun topic. A few years ago I spent a month churning out procedural music each day, and I'm still kind of happy with some of them.

E.g. this pseudo-fugue: https://fenomas.com/2017/12/advent-18/

Or this chiptune jazz standard: https://fenomas.com/2017/12/advent-17/

(caveat: sounds are all dynamically generated from WebAudio oscillators/filters/etc, so the audio might skip on mobile CPUs.)

I remember reading about Eno's generative music work in a computer magazine which featured a copy of Koan Pro on the cover disk. I was a bit young to really understand what it did though!

Sseyo since went on to create the generative music software Wotja, which is an app available on all the major platforms. Not got into it myself but it is an interesting concept! https://intermorphic.com/sseyo/

Also by Brian Eno -- on Scenius (genius emerging from a community scene) and including a mention of a Universal Basic Income: "Brian Eno message - Don't get a job" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-53tzx69fM

We're always one step behind him.

While not a sophisticated as what Brian Eno talks about, "Musical Phrases" is some Android software I wrote about a decade ago generates musical phrases which you can then breed into new phrases and also arrange into compositions. https://www.musicalphrases.com/

A simpler version of it is called "EvoJazz": https://www.evojazz.com/

Someday I am hoping to find the time to make a web version.

Reading this article also gives me some ideas on how it could be improved further.

I also co-wrote some software for breeding 3D botanical plants that grow from a numerical seed. Again, another program I hope to bring to the web someday (similar to how I ported StoryHarp from Delphi to the web a couple of years ago): https://github.com/pdfernhout/PlantStudio

That idea of breeding plants in simulation (and then later music) came in part from "The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design" (a 1986 book by Richard Dawkins).

I can also credit a computer music course I took at Princeton circa 1984 from Paul Lansky with helping inspire the idea of generating interesting sounds and soundscapes. Although before that was playing around with sound on the Commodore PET including via a four voice sound card (an amazing thing back then in the late 1970s) and then on the VIC-20 and C64. Having an electronic organ in the house growing up was also another influence (including as keys would get stuck on) -- as was a tape recorder. Hard to remember how difficult any sort of electronic music and sound was to do in the late 1970s and early 1980s... Now it seems almost trivial given smartphones and laptops...

I can also credit a graduate course a SUNY Stony Brook called "Understanding Math through Art and Music" which I audited. I made a final project on a Mac that randomly generated eight musical notes. It was not much of a project (and not even a full octave span) -- but it made me realize that there is art in how we choose to take randomness and convert it into something tangible or audible.

One key early idea early on was also learning from a Commodore PET newsletter how to make a stream of pseudo-random numbers from a simple algorithm -- which I eventually used to generate terrain for a VIC-20 game called Intruder Scramble (inspired by the Scramble Arcade game). That video game helped pay for part of Princeton. And that idea of a repeatable stream of pseudo-random numbers to define a derived repeatable structure you can explore then made its way into PlantStudio and EvoJazz/MusicalPhrases. Minecraft uses a similar idea for producing repeatable terrain from a seed value.

It's Gonna Rain (referenced in article) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vugqRAX7xQE

Me: Into Eno in 85, never came back.

sidebar: I'd wager the Bull of Heaven guys read this article

Anyone remember the political documentary/s that use Brian Eno music? At least I think it was his. They are quite popular with a bit of a conspiracy theory bend.

Edit: It was HyperNormilisation

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