For many, generative music is a paradox, a kind of endlessly inventive elevator music. As producer Brian Eno said, it's "as ignorable as it is interesting."
But if British music technology company SSEYO is right, computer-generated music will become as prevalent in the online experience as lite FM is in American offices. Last week, SSEYO made available a free PC version of its generative music tool, KoanX, and a plug-in pack for listening to files, the Interactive Koan Music Control.
One leap the Koan technology makes is to make music delivery possible without using data-intensive MIDI or .wav sound files. Instead of transmitting a huge file of coded sound, Koan delivers a small scrap of data consisting of a composer's selections from a menu of pre-defined constraints - pitch, scale, and harmony rules - that simply tell a computer's sound-making apparatus what to do. Compositions of any length can be delivered in 5K to 20K files.
"By and large, the Net has been silent," said SSEYO managing director Tim Cole. "If you've personally wanted to put music onsite, you've got to find a MIDI clip ... which is pre-canned and copyrighted. But with our tools, every time you go to a site you would hear new music." It's not entirely an open system. To sample the music, PC users must first download the IKMC control (a Mac version is due soon).
Akin to Mozart's Musical Dice Game, generative music needs only a specified range of effects rather than an actual score. While techno or jungle numbers use sequencers to organize pre-recorded tracks, SSEYO's generative player operates entirely on the fly, mixing melodies based on its system of compositional constraints.
The possibilities for such a data-scant system are many, said Scott Holtzman, CEO of visual imaging company Perspecta and expert on generative music.
"If you're trying to have an immersive virtual world or do [music delivery], it's an extremely efficient way of describing music, well-suited to the bandwidth issues of the Net," Holtzman said.
SSEYO's clear goal is to push its full-fledged KoanX player (priced at US$60) and the high-grade Koan Pro ($225) that Eno himself uses. But the company will first have to popularize the concept of "generative music" with a catchy metaphor.
"Wind chimes are generative but you don't have compositional control," said Cole. "We've added some compositional control, but kept the simple element - the wind."
Some see the availability of such tools as the beginning of a creative opportunity for the masses.
Because people are often confused by the complexity of generative music applications, many users just let the computer drive, said MIT professor Tod Machover, whose interactive Brain Opera featured generative music instruments like "The Singing Tree."
"It's not hard to create OK generative music ... that gets 95 percent of the way to sounding good," Machover said. "The real difficult part is to go the last 5 percent by making the algorithm clever. It's also [necessary] to write the application for people to get their hands in. Otherwise, all these sites will sound the same."
As high-tech as generative music may be, Perspecta's Holtzman said it actually returns music to its roots in live performance.
"As Brian Eno says, for centuries every time you listened to a piece of music, it was always different," Holtzman said. "It's only a 20th century phenomenon that you listen to a piece of music over and over and it's always the same."
Holtzman, author of Digital Mantras and Digital Mosaics, tracts on the evolution of online aesthetics, said the movement is just beginning.
"It took 20 years before people could realize they could move a movie camera, and 50 years for them to come up with MTV," he said. "We're getting just the first glimpses of what people are doing."
