Re: algorithmic composition


Steve Latham wrote:
"Michael Mossey" <michaelmossey@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1138939054.626483.312480@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Just want to share this with my friends at rec.music.compose:

The best algorithmic composition I've heard comes from Michael Gogins,
who has some fascinating ideas. You can hear some his music:

http://www.ruccas.org/index.php?Michael%20Gogins

Check out the "orbifold" pieces. He is using some math I don't
understand, but this guy has an incredible knack for making music out
of pure mathematics.



I'm not a math person. But the first thing that pops into my head is,
couldn't this have been written without some complex mathematical scheme?

Those are good questions, and some of them are answered if you read a
few of his papers.

As I understand it:

He started with some observations about visual images. First of all,
you can make very nice fractal images using simple algorithms. You can
also take an image and transform it using various mathematical
functions, like rotation, translation, shear, etc.

You end up that way with variety-within-unity and self-similarity.

Something problematic happens when you take similar techniques and try
to apply them to music. If you take the score as a two-dimensional
surface for example, (pitch as height and time as width) and you regard
a phrase as an "image" on that score, and then you try to rotate it or
translate it, you end up with an unrecognizable mess.

So Gogins has been searching for a "musical space".. a way of laying
out pitches and dynamics and orchestration and so on over a
multidimensional space, such that your typical mathematical
transformations yield coherent music. Or a fractal image, or a
self-similar walk through the space, yields music with related
self-similar properties.



It
sounds to me like going around your ass to get to your elbow. Maybe I should
say, it seems like an awful lot of work to achieve a result that may
(potentially) be achievable by less computational means.

Well, it's pure research, for starters, and also there are a lot of
interesting things to learn and places to take the idea. Also, note
that he is a mathematician and programmer, so I don't think he regarded
the method as complex.

I like the results,
but it reminds me of the people who spend hundreds of hours going to a site
to record a bat screech, bringing it back and dumping it in to a computer,
manipulating it in manifold ways, and stop tinkering when they've achieved a
sound that could be made by a stock synth patch with the envelope changed
(note: yes of course I agree that artistically speaking the results may not
be identical, and the artist's intent is valid in creating things the way
they see fit). It almost becomes (in my mind anyway) that the artist is
using the fact that it was algorithmically generated to justify writing the
music this way.

I suppose that could happen.

Not that this composer is specifically doing that, but I
could see where that would happen, because I do similar things on occasion -
use some extra musical thing to "justify" the resulting sound. What I think
I remain unconvinced about is that the artist is actually happy with the
result. That is, they don't just set up an algorithm and let it go. I guess
I'm going back to, I like to believe that the math is a means, not an end
itself, however, I'm not sure from listening to things like this that this
is necessarily always the case.

I guess my question is a philosophical one which could be debated at length:
1. Am I supposed to hear the math behind the result (unless the composer
intends it to be obvious, such as some obvious Fibonacci stuff I've heard)?

Interesting question. I think that if you were very familiar with the
math, and very familiar with the music, you would develop an
understanding of how they relate. For now, it's just music with a sense
of formal unity.


2. If not, then what's the point of using it to generate the piece?

Could one ask a similar question about 12-tone music? I knew that
Schoenberg's 12-tone music "hung together" long before I started to
pick out familiar bits of the row.


If anyone cares to share some thoughts on this, I'd enjoy the discussion,

Me too.

Mike

.

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