Exploring Generative Music

In this video, I'm going to be talking about generative music and how you can use randomized effects and MIDI effects to really begin to come up with new ideas that you might not have.

I like to think of this as "the moth in the machine" or letting the computer speak for a little bit. Because sometimes, when we're making music, we can get a little stuck, right? Especially if we're alone, making a track, we've got a melody, and we don't quite know where to go with it.

That would be a great instance to collaborate with some other music producer. Well, using generative music is a way of collaborating with the machine, with randomization as a tool.

A Deeper Look

To look at an example of this, I'm going to go deeper into it.

• We have just this one clip right now, and it's a C note.
• Then I have another one here that's also a C note.

If we look, there's a bunch of randomization happening in these MIDI effects before it goes to the instrument. So, if I press play, there's already some interesting things happening there.

Defining Generative Music

Let's talk a little bit more about generative music.

Generative music describes music that is ever different and changing and is created by a system. By balancing random machine-generated content with logical constraints and human editing, we can quickly create new ideas.

Key Concepts

• Randomization: Using the MIDI tools in Ableton Live.

• Logical Constraints:

  • Mini scale
  • Min/max settings on velocity or note range (like only from the bass end or only the mid-range)
  • Chance control on certain parameters

• Editing: This is the human part where we utilize our aesthetic and choices. This includes:

  • Splicing samples
  • Resampling
  • MIDI editing
  • Stretching and rendering these things out

Getting Hands-On

That was a basic overview of what generative music is. But we're really going to get our hands dirty with making generative music by using effects.

We can also use Max for Live device randomization. All these different parts contribute to random new variations that we can edit and use in our production.

In the next video, I'm going to show you how I built that example set. It will also be a free download for you to get. Then, you can go through the exercise if you want to really start getting your hands into generative music.