Tutorial : Generative music in Live

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 8:39 am

I've been sitting here for the last few hours listening to these, I love somafm's groove salad, if they go off the air I'll be bugging you for more of these. Damn, man... it's like the curtain was raised in the Wizard of Oz, so simple, great results and the write up you did is great, gotta love good community.

What about multiple generative racks on separate tracks? I gotta try that, want to hear all these at once, muahuahuahua!!!

Major respect, wow.

rhedcerulean · Post by **rhedcerulean** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 4:37 pm

Wow you totally opened up a whole new world to me.

Thanx so much -- I could really get into this.

spiral · Post by **spiral** » Sun Jul 22, 2007 1:46 am

nice work, sound great for about 3 seconds then kill by powerbook..

rhedcerulean · Post by **rhedcerulean** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 5:02 am

I am totally eating this sh!t up.

I love it. Id like to see more examples.

Is there any more out there in cyberspace?

What else can be done?

I mixed some glitchy textured beats with "infinity plus one" I had alot of fun with that little jam sesh. My mind is swelling with the juices of creative potential. I see a new set styte in my future. Its like planting seeds and then trimming and shaping while the noise comes to life, spinning and turning on its own. I felt like a Bonzai keeper -- only the Bonzai were tones and rhythms.

Im thinking I need more variables though. Ill use some prerecorded drum loops and some spacy samples. Ill do some breakbeat style set ups (even if the drum patterns are a bit more dubby). Im thinking Im going to build a glitch rack and write a dozen midi tracks too.

I know i can set up a few midi generatives so that i can move through a greater variety of ambient sound gardens.

But what else? How do I make an eb and flow? How do I arrange for more progression? what else can I do to make it just a touch more phrase oriented?
What else can be done to make it more beat oriented? :D

Casual Beats · Post by **Casual Beats** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 2:40 pm

dangerously addictive.

thank you Angstrom

rhedcerulean · Post by **rhedcerulean** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 7:01 pm

Any more sites that discuss ideas and posibilities about generative music?

Casual Beats · Post by **Casual Beats** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 9:52 pm

rhedcerulean wrote: But what else? How do I make an eb and flow? How do I arrange for more progression? what else can I do to make it just a touch more phrase oriented?
What else can be done to make it more beat oriented?

I was thinking these same questions, sort of a "predictable chaos" type of structure (yes, an oxymoron)

Liam · Post by **Liam** » Thu Jul 26, 2007 1:22 pm

Interesting link.

http://www.art.net/~simran/GenerativeMusic/kepler.html

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Thu Jul 26, 2007 5:31 pm

Doc Jones wrote:
rhedcerulean wrote: But what else? How do I make an eb and flow? How do I arrange for more progression? what else can I do to make it just a touch more phrase oriented?
What else can be done to make it more beat oriented?
I was thinking these same questions, sort of a "predictable chaos" type of structure (yes, an oxymoron)

did you notice the macros? tweak away!!

mooncaine · Post by **mooncaine** » Fri Jul 27, 2007 1:21 am

This will fun. Thanks loads for this interesting musical thingy!

I was inspired by a thread some time ago, maybe up to a year ago, to make some "generative" music with Ableton Live... or maybe I got the idea from the manual, when Ableton Live still had that new code smell.

I made a little piece with guitar synth, letting the MacBook Pro back me with some generative music, only I didn't know it was called that. I thought of it as "AI music" or at least "automatic music"*.

It's 1 minute long, on myspace/mooncaine, and named "ambient pond boathouse dawn".

I played the string-ish sound on guitar synth, and Ableton Live played bass and percussion, except that I liked a triplet of knocks it made, like a distant carpenter hammering on a board, so I made a few more of those by reaching over to the Trigger Finger on the second pass.

I thought the computer did an excellent job of sounding like an inventive percussionist playing accents and riffs. The bass line was limited to 3 choices of note, I think, and I was happy with that, too. The bass is real lo-freq, so you might not hear it on a laptop speaker.

Sinjin · Post by **Sinjin** » Fri Jul 27, 2007 1:41 pm

I realize im late to the party here...

nicely done Angstrom. I actually spent a v.small amount of time earlier this year trying to think of how to make a generative template that basically pulls the principles and tools from Koan and makes them available and functional in live. your method is a hell of a lot better than what i came up with, though in both cases my cpu is just too old to really be able to swing it. i do have enos 7 mil paintings around here somewhere tho, so til my new lappy arrives i guess ill just have to stick with that.

generative music makes me happy as i live for little surprises and nice things that i didnt have a direct hand in creating. 'happy accidents.'

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Thu Aug 09, 2007 8:43 pm

Angstrom · Post by **Angstrom** » Thu Aug 09, 2007 9:28 pm

Doc Jones wrote:
rhedcerulean wrote: But what else? How do I make an eb and flow? How do I arrange for more progression? what else can I do to make it just a touch more phrase oriented?
What else can be done to make it more beat oriented?
I was thinking these same questions, sort of a "predictable chaos" type of structure (yes, an oxymoron)

Hi, I missed a lot of these comments because I was in Spain for a week or so. Thanks for the bump TD.

To program for a little more ebb and flow, or to make it a little more diverse you could use Lives follow actions. Follow actions obviously have quite a few conditionals to make use of. Follow actions have two conditionals running at the same time - so you could have a conditional of 'go to the next clip which will change key from Gm to Dm' may have a potential of 1 against a 'stay right here' action potential of 10.

Examples of using follow actions might be : program changes, key changes, changing 'likelyhood' values within the rack(using an envelope)

essentially the clips would contain major structural modulations to the peice in the way that you might consider an 'arrangement', although it would still be semi-random you would know that you had a set of clips which ran through a wider palette than would otherwise be possible.

on a different, but related subject ...
my server bandwidth went through the roof last month because of this thread and the files attached ! I think I'll have to up it from the current 4gig threshold

spiral · Post by **spiral** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 6:35 am

got these on macbookpro and barely touches 50%
sounds great too

craftycurate · Post by **craftycurate** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 12:14 pm

Loving the Live Pack. Cheers!