While reading Brian Eno’s talk on Generative Music, I was very intrigued to experiment with setting up small rules to generate ambient music. For a long time I was fascinated with the fact that psycho-geography lets us reveal aspects of cities we dwell, in very interesting ways we would never have thought of before. By setting up small rules, music can also be made generative and could be made different and interesting each time it is played. (psycho-acoustics?). I will quote from Eno’s talk here about a music piece by Steve Reich called “it’s gonna rain”.

“it’s about 17 minutes long. It’s produced by a very, very simple process. It’s a loop of a preacher saying “It’s gonna rain”. Identical copies of the loop are being played on two machines at once. Because of the inconsistency of the speed of the machines they gradually slip out of sync with one another. They start to sound like an echo. Then they sound like a cannon, and gradually they start to sound like all sorts of things.”

These sort of things got me thinking of ways to make my dream instrument partly more realistic. And today while I was trying to understand the prospects of JunXion and LiSa, a quick thought came to my mind, which I wrote in my sketchbook.

“May 18th, 2006. 1:00pm. iLight ;) a small device disguised as a light (can have different designs, or it could be a device for embedding into lights). This device may use the direct power of the light (host). It has senses for sensing the lighting conditions of the space (homes, shops, office spaces), it also includes microphones (contact, cable, etc) to listen to sounds in the space. After sensing the ‘atmosphere’ of the space this device (which will also include a tiny microcomputer) calculates a set of rules for generating the music needed for the space to slowly bring about to a defined preset ambience, also the intensity and the colours of the lights (possibly LEDs) can be generative depending on the data received from the atmosphere.

The generated music would ofcouse have to be transmitted to the sound system of the space via FM or another means to be played. A system like this may be more cost effective for places like large department stores , shopping complexes, shops, as the music would be generated by itself.”

Precedent Studies:

Snottebel / 2005 by Sylvain Willenz

Steal Away by Harold Budd and Brian Eno