Generative versus intention?

Music & Patches
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I see so many people post about generative patches.

I use an absurd amount of random modulation. But once i have a patch together sonically i spend most of my time tweaking sequencer patterns. The core of what I’m doing involves a lot of listening and refining.

I’ve also done generative patches, but similarly, I spend a lot of time tuning the patch towards something with intention and meaning.

Some patches people post feel like they’re trying to avoid actually composing. A random voltage source and a C Dorian quantizer is good enough. You can hear when they abdicate control over what’s happening musically.

Am I being a snob? Or is this a real concern?

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I think if you are a snob, I am an even bigger snob. I use randomness only to modulate some stuff and sometimes to tweak a note or two. That being said, generative patches is a good way to learn what modules do and how different keys and modes sound.

I think your question boils down to “engineering vs composing”. And that’s what’s cool about modular. you can be one or another, or both… But composing is always better to me, because intention is what matters in music. If there’s no intention, that’s just… I don’t know. What’s the point in listening to it? Maybe if it’s funny like these shitposts on youtube “10 hours of silence interrupted by farts” or something like that – okay, I can get that. But if it is not funny and not… i don’t know, maybe a presentation of a module or a proof of concept, I never listen to it, because that’s not music in my opinion. That’s just noises and notes and whatever. So to me it is similar to using AI like suno or something. You can write a song yourself or you can go and use AI to do it. When you use AI, it’s not like you don’t do anything, you write a prompt and whatever, you correct and choose the results… That’s what generative patches look like to me. BUT if you use AI or a generative patch to generate some samples that you use intentionally later in your song or a composition - that’s alright and that’s what I think these instruments should be used for… Well, all of this is just my opinion. And probably people would have some counterpoints, so I am not dying on this hill, but I feel comfortable building a house there.

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Generative patches are fun and occasionally fascinating, but… I’ll put it this way: I haven’t used a Touring machine in a long while. But at the same time, I’m not into this modular business just because I’m a synth nerd (I’m not really). I absolutely do like the playful process of discovery in generative processes. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t put up with these really cumbersome ways to sequence whole tracks and instead do stuff with Ableton. (And end up not doing much of anything at all)

I define the rules of generation, take what the machine gives me, and sculpt that further into the thing I want it to be (mostly)

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No expert here, for sure, but what you describe as ‘generative’ music appears to be closer to ‘aleatoric’ music, in which some element of the composition is left to chance.

I’d say that in principle chance contradicts structure, and too much chance will sound chaotic.

So, a little randomness is good, but rolling too many dice at once will be less favorable, as listeners may lose their orientation, which likely makes them feel less comfortable.

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I agree with everyone above. When I first got into this, I was like “complete randomness yay!!” But soon realised that it was pointless. So my personal opinion is, structure, melody harmony and rhythm should still be intentional, but use generative (randomness) sparingly to add interest to these things. Less is more. Anyway, cool discussion.

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Of course we are talking about music (or structured noise) here right? Not sound effects or ambience? Which is a completely different ball game.

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It’s a question of taste, isn’t it? If you like total randomness, that’s fine. It’s not very musical in the traditional sense but it can sound good if it’s not too busy and the sounds are chosen carefully. I used to make a lot of generative ‘music’ (or pieces?), but I’ve gone off it recently. To be honest I’ve never heard a randomly generated sequence where I’ve thought “hey, that’s actually a great melody”. Then again, it depends what you are making. Ambient stuff is more about sound design and textures, rather than choice of notes.

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I use generative patches as inspiration for intention.

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But but generative isn’t random, is it? I’d define it as every process that isn’t intention carved in stone, step by step, but let run free. Say, a sequence of eight set notes, but driven by a 7 step trigger sequence that plays a 16th instead of an 8th on the last step. That is generative and very intentional.

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Generative can be as intentional and as unexpected as you want to make it. Truly, there must be an element of A.I. in any module or patch that is creating generative music. That A.I. can be at an extremely low level or it it can be very high level. My Meander module is designed around the low A.I. of the 1980’s, which for me was “expert systems”. I wrote professional expert systems at that time in one career iteration. Lisp, Prolog and Smalltalk and C for me in those days.

Meander is very simplistic on the A.I. scale, but, I taught it to be a music theory, composer and performer expert system with about 80 panel parameters that can be varied manually or via CV.

Meander will never create a piece that can compete with a master human, but it can easily create complex pieces that have several parts that are all playing together in a common key and time signature.

But, in the end, all music is subjective for the composer, the performer and the listener.

I an not a great musician, but Meander is my instrument that arose out of my first modular synthesizer of 1973. I had to teach myself music theory so that I could create a music expert system in 1988.

I have not gotten around to trying any of the LLM A.I.s, but I expect that if it cannot already, soon it will be able to create music that rivals human masters.

I also come from a background of systens engineering, simulation, math and physics. It is my belief that there is no fundamental limit to how sophisticated a simulation can be.

By the way, the name “Meander” comes from my use of “fractional Brownian Motion” (fBm or 1/f noise) time correlated multi-harmonic pseudo random numbers that can introduce extremely interesting variations in the music, but constrained within guard rails to keep it sounding pleasant, even if sometimes it may not be as interesting as what a human might compose and play. Meander is simulating composition and performance in real time, only determining each note to play milliseconds before it it played.

Anyway, I enjoy producing generative music as well as sharing my open-source Purr Software plugin with the world.

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Great topic!! I have reservations about Generative processes and results versus Intentional processes and results. I find I cannot really live with “chance” once I hear a song forming. I like writing little jams that become songs, it is a process I use constantly. I start new jams and keep returning to the ones that lodged in my mind enough to want to revisit and keep refining the sounds and note selection and envelopes and mixing between the parts and arranging what says what when. VCV makes this ongoing process so much fun.

But I have totally let some element go out of my control, just give it over to chance or a range of chances or a selection of a group of choices or some way of making music happen that I will just let that decision go away into the machine brain and let it decide based on my rules. So no matter how hard I try give up the moment by moment control, I define the rules and limit the outcomes just so, to basically get what I need in the end.

But if I hear something you are proud of, I hope it goes way beyond random source meets quantizer over drums, but sometimes my process it just a refinement of that very same thing. But I love complexity and change and movement, not just a wall of random this and thats jabbering away like lost isolated, but an arc, a beginning middle and end.

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music is not just about notes, there’s rhythm, there’s texture…and so on

of course I can see if there’s intention in some music…anybody with basic understanding of this language can

and even if I have maxed out all my composition exams at the conservatory…god bless random sources + quantizers! :smiley:

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13

Good points and I don’t think ‘snob’ comes into it, mostly a matter of taste. To me, a great generative patch sounds intentional with a few curveballs, which can be very interesting. A great example of that is something like Music for Airports. But in my head and heart I long for composing truly intentional music, and remind myself to take a deep dive into the Entrian sequencer, and if it doesn’t work out then surrender to learning a DAW. I want to try and get that music out of my head and into a patch, just like I’m hearing it.

But we’re all different, and when I tune into pieces that people post on Facebook Eurorack groups, I’m always astounded at the amount of people that seemingly like to listen to “dog farts and random bleeps”, and that’s definately not my thing. But blessings onto all :slight_smile:

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Modular lends itself to Generative music in a way that is nearly impossible to achieve any other way. Terry Riley’s In C is generative in a way, but that is an exception. These early experiments did not get very far, until the advent of electronic devices used to make sounds.

Generative is the natural form of modular music because it is so easy to do with modular. It’s really the first thing everyone does when they are starting out. For anyone feeling the need to go further, there arises a sense of progression towards intentional structure and away from generative structure. We don’t have to make generative music just because we are using modular.

Intentional structure is not as easy to achieve, but you can quickly get an understanding of sequencers, clocks and dynamics and it can be very rewarding to produce something with a structure. There are many patches that produce cover versions of classic songs.

For anyone interested in Sound Design, randomness has a place at a smaller scale - making interesting sounds means complex waveforms and randomness in the wave structure is a powerful tool.

Are we making music or are we making sound with no structure? I prefer to make music, and to listen to music and to that extent I am snobbish about it.

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15

Well said!

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Interesting discussion!

To me, the appreciation of making sounds and listening to sounds should always come first than any preconceived notion of structure or harmony. Generative is not opposed to intention, you are still making creative decisions. Even if you come up with a completely aleatoric way of making music, at the end of the day you still made the decision of calling it music.

The idea that music arises from intention and that intention arises from theory - that is, having the knowledge to make conscious decisions, like picking scales and so on and so forth - can be problematic in my view.

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I haven’t used a Touring machine in a long while.

I use 8 face with Turing machines. You can let it go randomly until ir does something good, thespin the knob so the pattern repeats. Capture presets with an 8face, so they can be recalled.

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My favorite thing about modular is creating life, in the form of a sound world that does things I never expected or intended it to do. Often I don’t even fully understand how and why it’s working the way it does. I like being surprised by my own creation.

If I wanted to compose something I’d use a DAW instead. Back in my youth, before DAWs existed, I used to write music on an extremely big piece of paper. Then you’d have to show your big paper to multiple people until you found someone who agreed to have their group play it for you. Then you’d have to transfer it from the big paper to multiple pieces of small paper–tedious and boring work. Thank goodness I’ll never have to do that again.

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