🎒 531: Computation Aesthetics is a class taught by Charlie Roberts.
Response based on How Generative Music Works: A Perspective and Abelton.com’s Learning music beta
Response
I think my top three favorite pieces were the additive rhythmic patterns, Listen to Wikipedia, and Music Mouse. The additive rhythmic pattern was catchy and I enjoyed seeing how the three simple patterns inter-related. I also was happy to see them showing on- and off-beat notes. The Wikipedia visualizer blew my mind. The connection between state change and musical notes was really unique and fascinating. Finally, the Music Mouse intrigued me because of how consistently it generated beautiful melodies and how easy it was to use and learn.
My least favorite piece was most likely the Helsinki Tram visualizer. It might be because I am not from Helsinki, but I don’t think it captured the movement of the tram. The tram system is alive and therefore the dots should be too, lurching dots jumping across the screen destroys the beauty of the visualization for me. I also had a hard time with “In C,” by Terry Riley. I couldn’t figure out what the colors meant and how it was making each permutation, so I didn’t feel like I could totally appreciate the piece. Overall, in both instances, I thought the audio generated was beautiful but the above listed conceptual hurdles took away from the experience.
I think all the components of the “essay” were interesting. I don’t know if I would call it an essay though. It felt more like a half-baked Prezi. The fact that I could only go forward without messing up the components was frustrating. I was also upset by the inability to jump to any one component. I was required to go through the entire presentation just to get to the section of interest. Regardless of the interaction design, it was very helpful to see live examples of each topic.
The overall themes of the presentation were really fascinating and I would enjoy spending a few months exploring various methods of generating music. Beyond just generating music though, the theme of incidental composition really stood out to me. At one point the author says, “The music is incidental - the tram drivers aren’t deliberately playing music to you.” I would be very curious to see how my work would look if I made design a byproduct of a process. What if I stopped focusing on design and rather focused on generating environments that were entirely detached from design, and explored how key features of the system generated patterns and solutions.
I think my favorite scale is the pentatonic scale. It is very easy to just putz around with and make cool melodies. After that, I really like minor scales for much the same reasons. I like the cooler, more emotional feeling that I get from the intervals.
Overall, I thought this was a dope way to use web audio for teaching about music theory. It made it really nice to just run your fingers up and down the number bar and know you were hitting the right intervals without having to think about whole-step or half-step. The notes were always right which made it easier to grasp the concept of how different intervals sounded. I think a few more keyboard shortcuts to switch keys or modes would have been icing on the cake.
I think I might consider using “non-traditional” scales. I really enjoyed the airiness of the whole tone scale. It reminded me of music from Zelda or Pokemon. I think if I were looking to make a more ambient visualizer I would look to the whole tone scale. The Pelog and 19-tone scale were really odd to me and without further training, in music theory, I do not think I would use those scales. I think it would be interesting attempting to generate melodies pleasing to a western audience but I imagine it would be hard shepherding a coherent song from these scales. I know Turkish music often rests in the cracks between notes and I would like to see how artists of different cultures use web audio in different ways.