What Would Context-free Art Sound Like?
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 6:32 pm
Greetings good people!
I am a music theorist working in the field of emergent/generative music, and MtViewJohn has kindly given me permission to post some information about a project I've been working on for a while which may be of interest (or at least passing amusement) to you.
The approach of the CFDG works amazingly when applied to the visual arts, and when I came across it a while back I immediately began to wonder how it could relate to the questions of musical emergence I was exploring. Composers and theorists have been exploring generative and process music for a while (at least since the 1960's) and continue to do so today, but many of their approaches suffer some inconvenient limitations. Constructing a musical grammar to capture some of my ideas about musical emergence seemed like a potentially fruitful approach, and so I've been pursuing this for the past few years.
I have created a musical grammar (and implementation) which is in many ways analogous to the CFDG (in fact a few of the design decisions, such as the way stochastic selection and repetition of actions are handled, were directly inspired by it). Of course there are some differences, such as in the selection of terminal symbols: in the CFDG one works with graphic primitives; in music, the terminal is the sound and the attributes it can have.
Earlier this month I released a set of compositions based upon this approach. They are distributed under a Creative Commons license and can be freely downloaded, shared, and used as the grist for further projects. I thought the members of this forum may be interested in listening to this music, as one possible answer to the question "what would context-free art sound like?"
The music is available for download (as variable bit-rate MP3s) from the site:
http://www.emergentmusics.org
There are also some essays and writings on the site about the theory and implementation of this project (which may be interest to the more theoretically and technically minded).
Please feel free to ask any questions you may have or give any feedback you may feel like giving.
All the best,
--Mark
I am a music theorist working in the field of emergent/generative music, and MtViewJohn has kindly given me permission to post some information about a project I've been working on for a while which may be of interest (or at least passing amusement) to you.
The approach of the CFDG works amazingly when applied to the visual arts, and when I came across it a while back I immediately began to wonder how it could relate to the questions of musical emergence I was exploring. Composers and theorists have been exploring generative and process music for a while (at least since the 1960's) and continue to do so today, but many of their approaches suffer some inconvenient limitations. Constructing a musical grammar to capture some of my ideas about musical emergence seemed like a potentially fruitful approach, and so I've been pursuing this for the past few years.
I have created a musical grammar (and implementation) which is in many ways analogous to the CFDG (in fact a few of the design decisions, such as the way stochastic selection and repetition of actions are handled, were directly inspired by it). Of course there are some differences, such as in the selection of terminal symbols: in the CFDG one works with graphic primitives; in music, the terminal is the sound and the attributes it can have.
Earlier this month I released a set of compositions based upon this approach. They are distributed under a Creative Commons license and can be freely downloaded, shared, and used as the grist for further projects. I thought the members of this forum may be interested in listening to this music, as one possible answer to the question "what would context-free art sound like?"
The music is available for download (as variable bit-rate MP3s) from the site:
http://www.emergentmusics.org
There are also some essays and writings on the site about the theory and implementation of this project (which may be interest to the more theoretically and technically minded).
Please feel free to ask any questions you may have or give any feedback you may feel like giving.
All the best,
--Mark
