After looking into generative music further, all of the sources I found were all different in their ideas and perspectives towards what generative music actually is. Whilst this is good in terms of comparing and forming a more objective viewpoint, considering I am very new to the world of algorithmic music I can’t help but feel a bit out of my depth. I wanted to write about generative music for my audio paper because it has recently become an important part of my practice, but with time constraints and the fact that I am doing three projects at once, I feel that it would be better for me to focus on something that is more straightforward. Maybe I can park this idea and possibly leave it for my third year dissertation where I will have more time to understand all of the different terms, approaches and perspectives that exist within the generative music world, because it is vast.
Here are some notes I made during my time researching generative music. I want to clarify that my decision to change topic is down to the time it would take me, as a newcomer to the world of generative music, to formulate an audio paper on a specific side of this type of music. I already have to get my head around how to create an audio paper since this is my first time, so I want to focus my attention on something that genuinely interests me and that I can form a convincing argument about.
I’ve recently been listening to a lot of ambient music, with the likes of Tim Hecker, Brian Eno and Grouper in my listening rotation regularly. When I listen to ambient music I find it interesting how trance inducing it can be. I find that compared to any other genre of music it transports me into a meditative state and has a transcendent quality that makes me listen in a very different way than if I were to listen to, say, Hip-Hop.
I think that ambient music and its ability to transcend and ease the mind will be great to speak about. There are so many different areas in music and art that ambient music has inspired, and there are a lot of amazing artists that I could look further into.