Why computer music?
- amoghdwivedi
- Nov 12, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 24
at my beloved boarding school circa 2018
Here is the direct answer: it lets me simultaneously think about, and instantly realize, my musical thoughts in a way which would not be possible without a computer. Do I want to wonder what an extremely sloppy/glissy atonal arpeggio (which moves not in note intervals, but frequency ratios) would sound like? I can code that in Max. I can alter those intervals with confidence, and setup a system which would allow me to cycle through different sets of successive frequency ratios over time. I can swap out the sound generators with which this arpeggio is produced in an instant. I can procedurally refine the sound to match my compositional vision by adding various modules to have concurrent sub-gestures influence the main gesture. I can experiment with randomization and how that may affect the musical outcome. I can tweak all of these predefined limits, either within reason, or to outlandish extremes, to see what I can create. I can maintain a library of these gestures and reuse them over time, building on them over the months and years, and tailor them to different projects over time. The blank canvas that computer music offers is indeed such a seductive invitation to explore your musical creativity.
And I can hear all of this, all of my trials, in real time- a constant feedback loop every step of the way!
Contrast this to working with human musicians. There is no need for me to befriend and consult a string player, peruse the extant literature for said instrument (though this is actually a deeply beneficial exercise), figure out a time to meet, learn the anatomy of the player’s hand, listen to their polite objections about what is practical/impractical, buy them coffee, only to have them play the gesture not quite as I wanted it on the day of performance. I have actually never had this experience, because neither am I consistently social enough to approach players- aha, there’s another reason for sticking to computers- nor have I composed something so ridiculously difficult for acoustic instruments that resulted in harsh criticism of my writing abilities. But perhaps my lack of thrill-seeking in the acoustic realm was informed by the fact that I satiated all my sonic desires through my electronic music anyway, and instead resorted to a more conservative and controlled approach to music when I wrote for my fellow humans.
Epiphanies are often sudden, but can be the result of an insistent probing of questions and dwelling on working answers which refuse to leave your mind. My adventures composing computer music began in earnest in spring 2023, when my professor showed us Iain McCurdy’s excellent Csound Haiku. I was blown away by the clarity of the compositional thoughts I heard in his pieces- I say this because a lot of music you hear made with computers, in DAWs, is often the result of conforming to tried and tested forms (intro-verse-chorus-verse etc.), predictable chord progressions, and an aesthetic that was typically commercial. Nothing wrong with any of these, and I have learnt a lot from improving my production skills in DAWs, but commercially oriented music seldom impressed me deeply, and I could often imagine a DAW timeline as I heard some of those tracks, as if there was really no deep mystery behind the music, nothing to discover. The Haiku in contrast sounded like they were alive, breathing, and full of character, and invited curiosity- I hadn’t encountered something like this in the electronic music world hitherto.
I got inspired that summer and started making my own Csound pieces, using McCurdy’s work as inspiration. One year later, I graduated from Berklee, with my Bildungsroman- a collection of 3 generative pieces in Max/MSP- being the crown jewel in my portfolio. Having not much to do as a Bachelor of Music, and being the reflective person I am, I started thinking about why I was drawn to computer music, as well as generative music.
These reflections in truth had already been simmering for a bit, having begun in the closing months of my last semester, particularly at my 10-minute jury session for my capstone project, where I presented my in-progress work to a group of EPD professors (most of whom I didn’t know). Having expressed my desire to go to grad school, some of the jury members thought it best to pick on me and say that I hadn’t developed the vocabulary to articulate why I was drawn to generative music, and that if I really wanted to make it into the academic world, then it would be best for me to think a little harder about my musical choices and be able to justify them. Although I felt grilled and roasted by the direct criticism and lack of praise at the time- most of them rated my work as being excellent, but I didn’t know this till my capstone supervisor revealed their feedback comments to me- I realized that they were right, and that I had to do the dirty work of understanding just why I spent so much time in Max, and also on generative music.
Improving at jazz piano, and improvising music, was the greatest personal achievement in my undergraduate degree. I recognized that both showing up to a piano, not knowing in advance what I was going to play, and wanting to create generative music, not knowing what the exact outcome of the patch was going to be, embodied the same spirit of spontaneity. I then realized that I had to build my jazz vocabulary over the course of many months and even years, and that contributed to me being able to summon those thoughts in real time. I likened this to me refining my generative patches over the weeks. All of this addressed the aesthetic reason for generative music.
At Longy School of Music in October, I presented my plain, acoustic, and pencil-and-paper-handwritten string quartet for a masterclass. To dispel any suspicions of me being a luddite, I confidently stated that I was going to pursue computer music in the future, and made it seem as though both writing acoustic music, and the “good piece” (one of the mentor’s words) I was presenting, were things of the past, an antiquated practice I had already abandoned in pursuit of musical practices of the future. The same mentor asked me, “why computer music?". I fumbled my answer at the time- “um you know it’s kind of deep I guess” or something along those lines- and realized that while I had addressed the issue of generative music, I was yet to understand the attraction to computer music.
Wanting to dig into my own autobiographical past, I suddenly remembered all the computer science education I had been through at school, which no doubt primed me to tackle computer music a few years later. There’s a particular manner of thinking that follows coding things. It is an odd combination of free-flowing intuition and crystal-clear rationality which simultaneously offers room for creativity, especially when you apply it to music. That addressed the technical intuition I had for computer music.
In due course, I formulated the thoughts in the first two paragraphs of this post which addressed both the technical and aesthetic- alongside practical and social- reasons for why computer music and I get along so well. I didn’t even bother to mention the sonic reasons why computer music sounds appeal to me, because I don’t know how to express why I am drawn to dirty saw fat basses more than gentle legato clarinet with as much clarity just yet. It is probably an inexplicable baseline preference, or an irreversible result of my musical tastes and exposure in my formative years.
Lifestyle, cultural, and historical factors influence my penchant for computer music too. The pianist Bill Evans was often said to have looked as if the piano was an extension of his body. As I sit in my blue lounge chair, and type without any perceptible hinderances on my QWERTY keyboard, I can’t help but feel like my laptop is just an extension of my own body. If Bill Evans grew up with a piano, then I grew up with a computer. This is a tool that has become so inseparable from my existence that it would be foolish to ignore the ease with which I can operate this machine and search and produce expressions of creativity on it.
As we head deeper into the 21st century, it is difficult to imagine a future without any computers. They are definitely here to stay. But what constitutes as a computer, how we interact with them, just how pervasive technology is to become in our lives, all these questions are hard to answer. It is cliché to express fascination towards the rate at which technology is advancing, and I am also unwilling to make any predictions about my relationship with it. But what I will remember for sure, looking back on these years, the early 2020s, is how intertwined my life became with this chunk of metal currently sitting on my lap, and how much it has contributed to my ability to explore my musical creativity.
Comments