It’s my generative music post!

1. Technique – Cellular Automata in Wolfram Tones (http://tones.wolfram.com/about/how.html). Wolfram Tones is a generative music application which uses simple rules to create complex structures. Based on Wolfram’s work “A New Kind of Science”, all the possible cellular automata are lined up in the program, and each time a score is generated the program picks one. That automata is then drawn in Mathematica, turned on its side, and then more Mathematica functions decide how to convert the drawing into notes. I played around with Wolfram Tones for a bit and I was very impressed! The computational power of simplicity is astounding.

2. Something cool – Sonar by Renaud Hallee.

Sonar from Renaud Hallee on Vimeo.

Sonar is a beautiful animation accompanied by a program which generated the score from the animation. I looked pretty hard to find a paper which could explain how such great music was generated from an animation like they claim, but alas I couldn’t find an explanation. The simplicity of the project again, and the timbre and selection of the tones really makes for a beautiful experience.

3. Another cool thing – Max/MSP Generative MIDI Patch by Fletcher Patch

This is a ridiculously unnecessarily complicated structure which generates MIDI from a MAX/MSP patch. I really like the orchestration of this piece in particular. No matter what was played by these instruments, it always sounded good and had a very nice and soothing yet intricate and complex texture to it. I think I want to make some generative music in my next project, and I don’t know whether Max, Pd, or even something else will be the platform of choice, but by looking at this patch I can definitely at least start with something that should sound good