webwork 2
RAND()%,
by Tom BETTS and Joe GILMORE (United Kingdom), 2003
Generative: "Having the ability to originate, produce, or procreate."
Rand()% is a unique node: an online radio station streaming generative computer music. Generative computer music is not pre-recorded, and is unrepeatable in many cases; it is in essence similar to emergent or living systems such as DNA: sets of rules produce behaviour (sonic life) within responsive environments.
Rand()% was launched by Joe Gilmore a.k.a. Plank and Tom Betts a.k.a. Nullpointer at the Ultrasound Festival in Huddersfield UK in november 2003. It streams constantly. Every 15 minutes a new piece begins. Which means a new set of rules are given control over the sonic space.
Now I can't see into the code generating the sounds at Rand()%, and there is an ongoing ancient debate in computer science concerning whether digital random number generators ever actually produce true authentic randomness, but these limitations aside, it seems safe to say that the programmer-musicians featured at Rand()% must have utilized random number generators (after all the site is named after the c++ rand() function which generates pseudo-random numbers). And in those cases where the artists didn't overtly utilize random-number generators, the interplay of diverse algorithms passing parameters through dense digitally-generated sound-patches produces a sonic experience which to the human ear (with its innate pattern-recognition brain programmed by evolution) can easily seem purely random.
Breakfast with Rand()% 9: 32 am :: If I had tuned in an hour and a half earlier I could have caught the Rand()% news. I wonder what the news might be: a pastiche of randomly-selected soundbites from online newscasts?...Anyway, Rand()% never sleeps, the cyber-musicians never tire, these are autonomous processes not subject to the constraints of physicality, inspiration, and/or human-defined tonal constraints of harmony and rhythm.
At 9:39 the buzzing chirping whirring of Rand()% is starting to penetrate my sleepy brain: an orchestra of diodes, capacitors and ring oscillators are tuning up for an electronic picnic. 9:30-45 am in Montreal is 13:30-45 GMT, and the artist of the hour is none other that Plank a.k.a. Joe Gilmore, co-founder (along with tom betts a.k.a. Nullpointer) of Rand()% The tone is quiet, tender, metronomic and somewhat ineffable. Any radical composer of the early twentieth century would have been overjoyed to so subtly exercise such a huge auditory palette, yet it is normative for Rand()%. Many of the software tools have become so powerful, they outperform analog instruments as they exhaustively explore variations at a speed beyond human capacity.
On Rand()%, the conceptual cacophony of John Cage's ideal randomness is swiftly being implemented digitally in ways which could theoretically generate pseudo-infinite variations of his entire oeuvre. Wild idiosyncratic visionary sonic palettes reminiscent of Harry Partch are growing relentlessly inside iterative patches; Stockhausen's spirit is probably wandering wistfully around the IP address of Rand()%... and maybe after half a decade of critical theorizing, some of the Rand()% composers will have achieved iconic visionary status, their names quoted by cyber-musicians, their names whispered over the wires by AI autonomous musician-borgs who will refer to these Rand()% coders as ancestors...
The conceptual underpinning of the work is strong : recursive and generative algorithms, microtextures, data converted into sound iteratively. The software is diverse and cutting edge: shockwave, pureData, maxMSP. And while it is often annoyingly defiant of humanistic harmonies, occasionally Rand()% delivers a revelatory aesthetic experience: the age of computationally-automated composition is being born.
Listening Note
I offer the following surrealist notes, made while listening to Rand()%, as evidence of the music's persuasive and poetic power:
... this one is a bit like listening to a lawnmower have slow tentative sex with a video game ( generative algorithms by Chun Lee a.k.a. Sonicvariable )... an aluminum bear sleeps by a cicada ocean whose heart beats like a gamelan bell... epleptic ham radio operator having a seizure in Alaska transmits staccato morse code and stutter-static moans through a mall in Mongolia... so many robotic beluga metronomes drenched in rusty sweat, breathing... a modest meditative cantata played by sinuous enlightened ring oscillators (one of my favorites, constructed in Director by Thor Magnusson + Runar Magnusson)... entropy shaving a mechanical heart with the microcontroller of love... gargling hyperspeed squirrels on stale acid... tron wage-slaves sifting thru mountains of percolating anarchistic data... again, geiger counters explore a keyboard store with pneumatic tendrils...
David 'jhave' Johnston
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