Randomised MIDI composition
Interviews
This piece was composed by creating a Max/MSP patch capable of outputting a random and theoretically infinite sequence of notes of a scale in C, at a quantized BPM. The duration and velocity of each note is randomized as well. The metronome of the piece was set at 500ms, which roughly equates to 120 BPM. The tempo was set higher here than in the previous pieces because the piece only consists on solitary piano notes, and a slower BPM would have seriously hindered any musical quality the final product could have. Although the patch allows the user to choose between a major scale, a major pentatonic, and a minor pentatonic, the recording of the piece used for the interviews was in C major, so as to be consistent with the first two pieces. Given that this patch is fairly straightforward, it is only capable of playing notes in a scale of C. Moreover, sound generation is also handled through MIDI here, mainly for the sake of simplicity as MIDI is far easier to implement than actual digital signal processing and sound synthesis. Precise explanations of what function each object performs can be found in the explanatory diagram.
I believe that if I had to give one word to define art or music more precisely, I would have said creativity. Commonly, one is going to assume that machines should imitate human creativity. I however believe that there are an infinite number of ways of being creative, and consequently a machine does not necessarily need to mimic human creativity but “could have its own form of creativity.” (Coeckelbergh, 2017, 297): why should humans be the only ones who can be ‘creative’?
Here, MAX/MSP has the capacity to take-action, to have an agency, which according to Lagrandeur (2018, 7) is a key component of “what makes posthuman art distinctive: this sort of art is often the result of mixed, multiple agencies—the artist’s and that of his or her smart tools.” (This would of course apply to Logic Pro’s composition, but the software’s agency in this piece is far greater.) By having an agency superior to that of the human in the creation process, the post-anthropocentric turn becomes extremely visible.
However, it is true that this composition, even if extremely interesting for my interviews, is quite ‘primary’ as this software is quite complicated to manage.
