Following up on my post about listening to podcasts, I have a much clearer idea of how to go about creating an audio essay. The scope that an audio essay offers exceeds the limits that a written essay restricts you to as a researcher trying to communicate your topic in an engaging way, and I want to use this freedom as a means to channel some of my sonic ideas and direction through research. Recently I have been immersing myself in making generative music, which is a term popularized by Brian Eno to describe music that is ever-different and changing, and created by a system (Wikipedia Contributors, 2021). In essence, as the producer/composer you create a set of guidelines that the system can follow, and from there it responds completely on its own terms which gives the illusion that the system is creating the sound itself (which it basically is). For example, on my Behringer synth I have been making generative patches where I’ll have multiple modulations controlling one another, for instance an LFO controlling another LFO’s rates. The more you modulate the modulators, the more extreme, complex and random the generative sound can become.
In light of my increasing fascination with this way of producing sound, I think it would be appropriate for me to focus on generative sound making for my audio paper. Generative sound is more relevant now that it has ever been with the ever-growing influence of artificial intelligence on society. The reality and potential of A.I means that within the next decade there will almost certainly be a whole new world that opens its doors to sound artists, in which sound making will be more of a conversation and collaboration between man and machine as opposed to man controlling the technology. I believe generative music is still extremely early in its journey, and as a result I feel this is a great time to speak on the topic. Furthermore, researching this alongside practicing it will increase my knowledge as well as my ability to integrate that knowledge into my work, and hopefully lay the path for my developing artistic identity to come into its own.
I have now got a general idea of what I want to talk about, so from this point I need to delve into my research and narrow down the subject matter a bit more. It will be a much easier and more effective project if I focus on something specific within generative music, such as generative music within A.I or comparing two or three generative artists. So my plan from here is to get on with researching!
Reference – Wikipedia Contributors (2021). Generative music. [online] Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music [Accessed 18 Oct. 2021].