Post your probability based, generative or just weird music/soundscapes

[justin3am]

Almost everything I do has some generative/probability based composition.
Here is something I put together with Numerology, many years ago:
https://www.3amnoise.net/equal_and_opposite.mp3
Every aspect of this track was generated but not what I would call 'random'. I setup some simple rules and let the piece sequence itself. I'm very happy with how the transition in the middle came out. If I remember, the first few takes of this were terrible.

Here is something that I did which is completely hardware-based:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3KGiaxXsjw

Again, no human interaction in this one. Just a lot of modulation and logic to determine the sequence of events. This is more random but again, based on a system of rules.

[IncarnateX]

https://greghooper2.bandcamp.com/track/ ... topography


Recording of a performance in Brighton, England where I walked up and down between our flat and the train station dragging a small bag along the ground like so many other tourists to Brighton. The vibrations of the wheels release an audible impression of the surface of the ground.

That is an exciting semi rhytmical sound. I think I hear cars in the background. Wheels of bag sound occasionally like a train from underneath the ground or just far away. There are very vague human voices in the background and did I hear birds at a point? I think an idea like putting your recorder in a bag and let music rise from an everyday sitaution is a way to make music too. I like to imaging notes of clicking heels when I am at stations; when people walk they make both rhythm and music, but only few of them know it.

[woggle]

https://greghooper2.bandcamp.com/track/ ... topography


Recording of a performance in Brighton, England where I walked up and down between our flat and the train station dragging a small bag along the ground like so many other tourists to Brighton. The vibrations of the wheels release an audible impression of the surface of the ground.

That is an exciting semi rhytmical sound. I think I hear cars in the background or something rising and falling like passing cars. Wheels of bag sounds occasionally like a train from underneath the ground or just far away. There are very vague human voices in the background and did I hear birds at a point? I think an idea like putting your recorder in a bag and let music rise from an everyday sitaution is a way to make music too. I like to search my mind for the notes of clicking heels when I am at stations; when people walk they make both rhythm and music, but only few of them know it.

thanks for listening and commenting with interesting observations. I too listen for walking - I made a 20 minute audio piece called "walk to work" which surprisingly was made from overlaid recordings of me walking to work across about a few weeks. I walked the same route everyday - through a cemetery, across a bridge, then around a lake to my office and was amazed at how the time it took me was so similar on every day. Later I added a video of the same thing - about 20 trips to work recorded with a little cheap usb flash drive camera hung around my neck
https://vimeo.com/65929045

[IncarnateX]

https://www.3amnoise.net/equal_and_opposite.mp3

Every aspect of this track was generated but not what I would call 'random'. I setup some simple rules and let the piece sequence itself.

It’s cool. I will be on the probability wagon too and that is not completely random in a generative sense, I agree. Mine will be even more like ordinary tunes but the variations of arrangement will be generated.

Here is something that I did which is completely hardware-based:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3KGiaxXsjw

Cool noises and modulations.

I am searching new ways to fuse into machines beyond controlling everything they do, the rise of musical cyborgs, and this ^^^ represents the principle of artifical life I like to exlore too, though closer to tonal compositions.

[IncarnateX]

https://vimeo.com/65929045

So these are layered steps that almost sound like one walk only? I think the vid and sound would apply to what a fellow researcher and I call “Rhythms of capitalism”, which signify the routines of modern society in which we do the same thing over and over more than 80% of our lives. Thus if you make a graph of our life long exposure to visual and auditory stimuli you will have a clustered center, like that in your video and audiotrack, and few variations in comparison. Fascinating and scary at the same time.

[woggle]

https://vimeo.com/65929045

So these are layered steps that almost sound like one walk only? I think the vid and sound would apply to what a fellow researcher and I call “Rhythms of capitalism”, which signify the routines of modern society in which we do the same thing over and over more than 80% of our lives. Thus if you make a graph of our life long exposure to visual and auditory stimuli you will have a clustered center, like that in your video and audiotrack, and few variations in comparison. Fascinating and scary at the same time.

yep they are layered steps from maybe 15-20 walks. I too am fascinated with routine normal life - I have a photographic series on how people join their driveways to the guttering for instance (where I live there are no rules on such things so there is a lot of variety to how people tackle that seemingly simple construction). Also the walk to work idea started as photos - I was fascinated with how every day crossing the bridge my view was of others walking to work with backpacks on, and so was everyone else's
Do you have any links to papers on rhythms of capitalism? I used to be an academic too

[IncarnateX]

Do you have any links to papers on rhythms of capitalism?

Actually there is not much on the subject to be found and that has inspired us. If you search “rhythm and capitalism” on scholar or other research engines most of them make use of “rhythm” in a figurative sense, e.g. rhythm of the market, but not in terms of the stimuli of everyday life.

For my part, I have just gotten into it a year ago with my fellow due to a shared interest in alienation, so we haven’t published together yet but are working on our ideas. I take advantage of his knowledge about critical sociology and he take advantage of my knowledge of music and rhythm theory and not at least cognitive psychology with respect to phenomena like adaption and habituation.

One famous critical sociologist that was also a composer was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), though he never took his musical parallels as far as we would like to do, namely to interpret them as concrete visual and auditory rhythms of modern life.

[woggle]

Sounds very interesting and I would be interested to read what you come up with

My researchbackground is Neuroscience

I have thought quite a bit on the adaptive function of music. There's the Vancouver Soundscape group and the idea of soundmarks - also they did a lot on visualising sound within communities across the day - plus there is some recent stuff on soundscape in rural Europe (I think Portugal) Angus Carlyle name pops up so maybe he has written some stuff. Soundscape studies / Acoustic ecology is the area. Also the biology community are extending their work into human landscapes (I think)

Oh and I did a piece ages ago called Across the Road - that used rcordings made every Tuesday for 7 months between 10 and 11 of a bunch of guys building a house across the road from us. The supervisor drew up a map of the activity cycle for me at the end of the build and I used that as part of the compositional structure

[ThomasHelzle]

https://excerpts-of-infinity.bandcamp.com/
This is an older piece I created back in the Ableton Live days, before Bitwig came out, but later transfered it over. The central "Generator" is Nova64 by ToneCarver - his tools are my all time favourites when it comes to generative.

https://thomashelzle.bandcamp.com/album ... l-nature-2
Is another piece that is fully generative. A Lemur script plays the Bazille Flute, which in turn generates everything else with the help of Sandman and Molekular and some other tools.

https://thomashelzle.bandcamp.com/album ... nd-piano-1
This one is based on a Processing script I wrote long ago that generates Midi from Perlin Noise with some added things like repetitions and phrases.

Right now I'm more into playing the acoustic guitar, but hope to be able to combine live playing with generative elements. I already use JamOrigin Midi Guitar to do realtime Audio to Midi which allows for interesting things...

Probability is part of what I like to do, so I created a Midi Mangler in Reaktor & Falcon:
https://www.screendream.de/code/toms-midi-mangler/

Bitwig is extremely helpful in this realm, since it's so flexible with routing and has no limits on device order/number, so you can have as many Midi plugins in a row as you like.
Also, the modulator system is fantastic for everything generative.

Cheers,

Tom

[woggle]

https://excerpts-of-infinity.bandcamp.com/
This is an older piece I created back in the Ableton Live days, before Bitwig came out, but later transfered it over. The central "Generator" is Nova64 by ToneCarver - his tools are my all time favourites when it comes to generative.

https://thomashelzle.bandcamp.com/album ... l-nature-2
Is another piece that is fully generative. A Lemur script plays the Bazille Flute, which in turn generates everything else with the help of Sandman and Molekular and some other tools.

https://thomashelzle.bandcamp.com/album ... nd-piano-1
This one is based on a Processing script I wrote long ago that generates Midi from Perlin Noise with some added things like repetitions and phrases.

Right now I'm more into playing the acoustic guitar, but hope to be able to combine live playing with generative elements. I already use JamOrigin Midi Guitar to do realtime Audio to Midi which allows for interesting things...

Probability is part of what I like to do, so I created a Midi Mangler in Reaktor & Falcon:
https://www.screendream.de/code/toms-midi-mangler/

Bitwig is extremely helpful in this realm, since it's so flexible with routing and has no limits on device order/number, so you can have as many Midi plugins in a row as you like.
Also, the modulator system is fantastic for everything generative.

Cheers,

Tom

listening to these now Tom - some beautiful work, lovely guitar playing

[ThomasHelzle]

Thanks woggle!

But there is no playing of any instrument involved in these, they are all 100% generative/procedural/ITB.
What I do "play" there is the generators, the mix, the instrumentation and the effects and modulation, but it's more selecting than playing.
A bit like gardening in a way, where you do not totally control what happens but put the seeds in, water them, take out weeds and then let yourself be surprised of what comes out of it...

What I would like to do in the future is creating a generative system the can be "played" with for instance a guitar to midi tool or a MPE controller, to add a layer of meaning, direction and emotion on top of the generative structures. I had hoped for Loomer Architect/!Epoch to be my tool for that, but this didn't happen so far...

Cheers and thanks again,

Tom

[woggle]

Thanks woggle!

But there is no playing of any instrument involved in these, they are all 100% generative/procedural/ITB.
What I do "play" there is the generators, the mix, the instrumentation and the effects and modulation, but it's more selecting than playing.
A bit like gardening in a way, where you do not totally control what happens but put the seeds in, water them, take out weeds and then let yourself be surprised of what comes out of it...

What I would like to do in the future is creating a generative system the can be "played" with for instance a guitar to midi tool or a MPE controller, to add a layer of meaning, direction and emotion on top of the generative structures. I had hoped for Loomer Architect/!Epoch to be my tool for that, but this didn't happen so far...

Cheers and thanks again,

Tom

aah - I thought the guitar sound in the first piece was you playing guitar

yes it is a shame about the Loomer Architect/!Epoch - on the other hand there is so much other stuff

did you not find Usine suitable?

[ThomasHelzle]

yes it is a shame about the Loomer Architect/!Epoch - on the other hand there is so much other stuff
did you not find Usine suitable?

Yeah, I used Usine for some years since in theory it could be almost perfect. But in reality, I always ran against certain conceptual/structural aspects of it that somehow didn't work for me.
I use node based software for my 3D work (SideFX "Houdini" mostly these days) and totally love this way of thinking when done well - Houdini mixes code and nodes so brilliantly, it's unbelievable. !Epoch sounds much closer to that than Usine - or so I hope.
Bitwig does 90% of what I need very very well and is a pleasure to use (under the hood it's modular and one can feel it in it's structure), it's the deeper generative Midi part that almost no software really nails in a way that makes sense and is fun (I had M4L in the past but didn't gel with it either and tested many generative tools, but they often become super nerdy and dull to use. Reaktor just doesn't handle Midi very well or user friendly, it took me ages to get my Wrangler to work right).
Let's hope Colin will get over his perfectionism at one point and actually release it. That should be a game changer.

Cheers,

Tom

[farlukar]

From the “Cyborg” contest, rando.m

[IncarnateX]

https://thomashelzle.bandcamp.com/album ... l-nature-2

I agree with woggle, we are in beautiful-land here (though I have only screened two of them so far, they are long listenings).

https://thomashelzle.bandcamp.com/album ... l-nature-2

This one reminds me of the likewise beautiful soundtrack from Bioware’s “Icewind Dale” PC game when you reach the town of Kuldahar and its Tree of Life, creating a spot of summer in the middle of an otherwise harsh winter landscape.

Thanks for posting.