Generative Music is a term used to describe music that is created by a system and that is ever changing. Steve Reich composition “It’s Gonna rain” is a pioneering piece of generative music. In this composition Reich uses two identical tape recordings of a man saying its gonna rain, he puts them in two separate tape players and changes the playback time by a small amount, when the tape starts playing both recordings are in sync but after a while the both tapes start phasing between each other, creating and endless evolving composition created by a simple mechanism. Brian Eno, inspired by Reich, developed this concept in his album “Music for Airports”, where he used seven different tape recorders playing single notes at different speeds. This created and endless piece with long lasting melodies and textures. Both Eno and Reich created a system that mechanically reproduces a composition, they designed rules for the system to follow but at the end the pure composition is made by chance. At the start of this blog I wrote about a practitioner called Jessica Ekomane, she also uses this technique of generative music in her EP Multivocal, but instead of using tape she uses Max MSP, this an example of how the technique is modernized but the concept remains the same (Teropa, 2020).

Aleatoric music is a composition technique where an element of it is left to chance (Music 101, 2020). An example of this would be writing a melody but instead of carefully choosing each note, you use a dice or any probability device to choose the next note. Composer such as John Cage and Iannis Xenakis have created aleatoric music, using very complex techniques such as complex mathematical formulas to come up with random numbers. Generative and Aleatoric music go hand by hand because they both have the aspect of chance. Generative music is always aleatoric but aleatoric music is not always generative. The thing that makes generative music separate from aleatoric music is its characteristic to be endless. The composer decides when the system will stop, but if its never stopped it would sound forever.

These both concepts are a way to make my music non linear, as I mentioned in my passed post and it inspired me to do my next composition totally generative. With modern technology it’s very easy to create generative and aleatoric pieces and tape is not longer needed. The video below thought me various techniques of generative music (Loopop, 2019).

In the global sound mediums, it is recognized that generative and aleatoric techniques where created by western contemporary composers such as the ones mentioned above but is this really true. African drum music uses these techniques and their origins date older than contemporary music. African drumming uses a technique called polyrhythms that could be argued that is the first generative technique. It consist that each performer plays a rhythmic pattern with a different duration to the rest of the performers, creating evolving rhythmic syncopations. This is basically Eno’s idea but humanly performed. The fact that African polyrhythms are not consider as the pioneers of generative music is evidence of how western culture tries to dominate over other different culture’s.