The interesting, and amazing thing about generative music, is that it has a 4th dimension. You can’t just put a screenshot online to describe what it is. And because it involves time, it is in a sense, interactive. Even if it’s not a direct interaction, it has an indirect interaction with time.

Scape – by Brian Eno

Turns out, the very person who coined the term : Generative Music, has a couple of iOS apps for making generative music. One of them is particularly interesting, because I think the way you interact with the app also is unique like the music.

Heart Chamber Orchestra

The Heart Chamber Orchestra – HCO – is a rather different piece of generative music. performance. It’s an orchestra, and it consists of 12 classical musicians. Using their heartbeats, the musicians control a computer composition, and the score is generated in real time by the heartbeats of the musicians. They read and play this score from a computer screen placed in front of them. Custom-made software analyzes the incoming heart-beat data and via different algorithms it generates the real-time musical score for the musicians, the electronic sounds and a CG visualization via 2 projectors in the space.

Quasar – Envis Precisely

Quasar is a midi-visualization app for iphone. However, the visuals, are also computer generated. So it’s partly visualization, partly generative. Makers of the app, did not take the usual route of creating a piece of music first and then find some visualization for it; instead both elements have been developed at the same time.