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Comment by WilTimSon | Hacker News Reader

The details still escape me as I feel like I read the words but didn't get the meaning, which is by no means a knock on the write-up, I'm just a complete fool when it comes to musical technology and recording.

However, it is a delightfully formatted experience and I spent several minutes playing with the randomize buttons on the site. Don't think any of the resulting mixes sounded bad, but Eno's original is, of course, unmatched. Would be interesting to see something similar for more traditional genres, where a song is picked apart and you can then randomize its bits and see if anything beautiful comes out.

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There used to be quite a thing for randomised conpositions in the Baroque era and later, called Musikalisches Würfelspiel.

There was also a thing around tape cut-ups in the 1950s, with William Burroughs being very into this stuff, with David Bowie later picking some of this stuff up. It was more about deconstructing expectations than creating something beautiful, but some of the material is very interesting.

For the first, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspi...

Incidentally, Bowie would even do this with lyrics. He would write up lyrics or some phrases, then cut up words or combinations of words, and move them around. That’s why (I always thought), he lyrics gave off a common theme with really interesting and novel turns of phrase.

Bowie even came up with a software in the 90s called the Verbasizer to further automate his cut-ups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3IKLMgFaDA

There is also a web app version at https://verbasizer.com/

Interesting. An associate of Burroughs, Ian Sommerville, wrote a program in the 1960s to permute lists of words to help Burroughs for similar reasons.

Music is about tempo and sync. In fact, nowadays you can throw anything into a modern DAW software and it will instantly sync everything for you.

Eno instead put randomness/chaos at play by using tape loops of different length, so they will never (or very hardly) repeat at the same interval again, or, in his own words:

    What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable — they are not likely to come back into sync again.

Think of a series of little music boxes with each a different tune and length, you start playing one a time in random order, and the whole epiphany is that you expect chaos and dissonance but instead you still got an organic and nice harmony. And that's the basics of generative music, in the most simple words I can find.

For another interesting musical experiment, listen to "Poème symphonique", a "composition" that basically sets up 100 metronomes, winds them up, sets them to random (I believe) speeds, and lets them play and wind down. It starts chaotic, until they eventually run out and form interesting rhythmical patterns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAYGJmYKrI4

Didn't know about that! But Steve Reich also did many experiments with musical repetitions; his compositions are supposed to be played live (not rely on machines) but they can also be set up in a DAW. "Piano Phase" is pretty easy to implement for example.

Contrary to the quote by Eno in the article, Reich's loops are be "commensurable" -- after a certain point they repeat exactly. It seems that's what interests him: some kind of mathematical predictability.

Reich's earliest experiments with what he terms "phasing" were done on (tape) machines. It was only after a few successful tape pieces that he began to wonder if humans could actual perform music composed around the same principle (they could!)

It’s very esoteric and even ponderous imho, but that’s just speaking of his personal albums. When he comes in with other artists like Bowie and Roxy Music, he’s an incredible collaborator and gives so much depth to the music.

> Eno instead put randomness/chaos at play by using tape loops of different length, so they will never (or very hardly) repeat at the same interval again, or, in his own words

It's a least common multiple problem, right. The same idea is used with polymeters when things are on the grid instead of arbitrary lengths of tape loops.

> Music is about tempo and sync. I

That's an exceptionally limited definition, and misses out so much music from around the world and throughout time.

It's also not even particularly reflective of how human musicians playing even "dance" music (which you'd think would be most exemplary of this definition) actual perform.

Eno's interest in what used to be called "process music" was very much of the era (some of the minimalists had similar interests), and they were much less about avoid avoiding particular characteristics of music as reinventing the compositional process.

Also, if the set of loops really are ill-suited for each other, you will get chaos and dissonace. A good part of the art of generative music (a phrase that has taken over from the 60s/70s "process music") comes from carefully selecting things that, despite their somewhat random relationships, nevertheless sound good (however you define that) when combined using some algorithm/mechanism. That's a non-trivial thing to do.

It's a quite different experience to a Web page, but if you want to play with messing about with music without becoming a musician as such, https://sonic-pi.net/ is absolutely fantastic as you can manipulate samples and sounds using a Ruby-like language. For example, this sort of fiddling: https://youtu.be/DdtcMf9YI7s?t=508

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