Meandering Station | An Exploration of Generative Melodies
This one's been a long time coming.
I made this track a long time ago, right around the time that Spitfire Audio came out with their London Atmos and Soft Piano presets. It was the first time I really came to understand how to do generative melody and harmony in modular synthesis.
Coming from a classical music background, one of the goals I have with generative or modular synthesis is to create an instrument from which I can compose more melodically and harmonically inclined music. In other words, create classical-type music generatively. I was first inspired to do this while watching Colin Benders do something similar. However, eventually, I want to do this orchestrally.
In this particular patch, I've been able to make generative music sound a little more human. The ability to do polyphony in VCV Rack has helped immensely with reducing the number of modules required for the task. By mixing different timings of notes to a large variety of arpeggiations while fixing the key in semi-random note generation, this patch sounds basically like a human being spontaneously playing piano in an urban atmosphere.
What is the Definition of Music?
This is a fascinating topic for me.
As a kid, being trained classically on the piano and other instruments, my understanding of music was defined within certain borders. Namely, making sure there was a familiar (or at least memorable) melody and harmony to supplement it was the foundation of what I called “music”.
However, as I grew older, being introduced to jazz, rock, hip-hop, and other contemporary styles of music, that definition broadened quite a bit. A beat could be music. Actually, all of music can be seen as just beats sped up or down. But music was still confined within a certain garden. Even with jazz and its improvisational nature, you could still hear a semblance of repetitious pitches which would define the piece being played.
So as I stepped into the world of modular synthesis, and generative music specifically, I came to a pause as to what the definition of music actually is.
The world of generative music quite different fundamentally than anything else I've encountered so far. It has certain familiar elements, such as improvisation, sequencing and modulation, as well as other techniques and skills required for instrumentation and music making. But what makes generative music different is that the act of creating music doesn't seem to reside in the musician—or to be more specific, the human being.
Instead, someone who is creating generative music seems to be responsible for capturing a moment of cohesion within a contained set of limited, but random, rules. And this skillful capture results in the realization of beauty within the system.
It's certainly interesting to think about it in this way. I think many creatives, whether they are traditional composers or musicians, or whether they are artists or writers or filmmakers, would probably agree with that statement above. That their art is not so much their own inventiveness, but seems sometimes to be a capturing of something that was already there, but making that chaos into a cohesive (and hopefully beautiful) thing. This would be why Homer would call upon muses to aid his storytelling. Why musicians, when we look back on something we made, we are at a loss for how it was even created in the first place (even though we were the ones that did it!).
But with generative music, that concept seems to being at the forefront of its creation.
It's an interesting evolution of the definition of music for me. I'll definitely come back to it in the future.