🎵 Windchimes
This is a generative piece I built just before my daughter was born. I envisioned something that would soothe a baby, like a mobile but with sound. Like wind chimes but smoother. As it turns out, once she was born I forgot about most everything, including this project. Much later I rediscovered it and found it soothing myself!
Thanks! Yeah Brian Eno is a huge inspiration to me for this sort of music. I don’t think he invented it, but he definitely fine-tuned the ideas and created a new movement of “ambient” and “self-playing” music. Another great example is the score to the video game “Spore” – it’s procedurally generated based on the characters and environment in the game. It might be obvious, but I’m fascinated with this idea of composer and machine cooperation- it’s part of why I love modular synthesis so much.
Clive Thompson looks at the marriage of music and machine learning to create tracks on demand. He discusses some of the possibilities, such as generating hours of ambient music on the fly or creating quick and easy soundtracks. It is interesting to think about this alongside software music and the innovation driven by broken machines.