Wednesday, 10 February 2010

Generative Music

Why is all generative music all so horrid. When you are wandering around in a morning and you hear the dawn chorus, it sounds awesome. Is not all it is a series of musical phrases that are triggered for enviromental reasons (seemingly at random). Why is that case does generative music not sound awesome. I can't decide wether it has to do with the complexity of the over all system, or the interplay of the phrases within each system, or is it just because birds are analouge and not digital.
The dawn chorus contains all birds, supposedly, singing at the tops of their lungs like crazy. In that case they are not listening to each other and responding, so in that respect, there is no intellegence going on. All the little bird does is pump it's little songs out as much as possible... If a generative peice of music was written that did this it would sound awefull and cocofanous.
Maybe then, the dawn chorus actually is cacophanous, and we have just gotten used to it?

NOTE: In trying to find an audiosample of the dawn chorus for this blog, I became slightly distracted and found somthing even better. THIS, is a sample found on a website with the followin description "Lightning whistlers propagating in the magnetosphere. Lightning-generated whistlers came into regular use as remote probes of the radial distribution of electron density in the Earth's geomagnetic equatorial plane."

Wednesday, 3 February 2010

Music to come down a mountain to.

Within the next 3 weeks, i'll be spending seven days in the alps, in a combination of sitting on a ski lift, and sliding down a mountain (hopefully not on my butt!), and have come to the conclusion that instrumental post rock will just annoy me. I'd imaging the best kind of music would be something slightly repetative (keep your mind on the mountain) happy and floaty (the mood I hope to be in coming down the mountain). Reading back that description, it looks like "Trance" to me... so I wanna find some good trance, but i'm not sure whether "good trance" isn't an oxymoron. I've got as far as "Concord Dawn" and then got completely sick of it, this is going to be hard work! :)

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Followup: I was far to busy to listen to much music!