Algorithmic approaches to music involve working with music as language, and vice-versa, in fact music and language become inseparable. This allows a musician to describe many layers of patterns as text, in an explicit way that is not possible by other means. By this I mean that musical behaviours are given names, allowing them to then be combined with other musical behaviours to create new behaviours. This process of making language for music is not one of cold specification, but of creative exploration. People make new language to describe things all the time, but there’s something astonishing about making languages for computers to make music, and it’s something I want to share.
Here’s a recording of one of the live streams I’ve been doing while working on my solo album Spicule from my home studio:
I start with nothing, but in the last few minutes everything comes together and I have a couple of different parts that start feeling like a whole track. There isn’t really a musical structure to the session apart from the slow building of parts, and a sudden cut when everything comes together. The macro structure of the track will come later, but by a process of trying rough ideas, and listening to see where they go, the music emerges from the words.
I generally go through much the same process when I’m doing improvised performances, making music from nothing, but this feels very different.. Instead of being tied to the structure of a performance, making continual changes to work with the audience’s expectations, I’m dealing with repetitions even more than usual. I’ve started experimenting with lights, at first to try accentuating the sound but I think now more to help focus, to get inside the repetition and maintain flow. Unfortunately doesn’t quite work in the video because the sound and video are slightly out of sync.. But the left/right light channels map to the left/right speakers, and each sound has a different colour.
As live coding develops, I still really enjoy improvisation, but am finding myself doing polished performances more often, involving prepared tracks, with risk low, and the original making processes behind them hidden. This is probably for the best, but then it feels important to share the behind-the-scene improvisation and development that goes on.. My pledgemusic crowdfund is a great way to do this, thanks to the generous critical feedback, encouragement and (gulp) hard deadline.. If you haven’t joined it yet, you can do it here!
