I love generative music because I love musical improvisation

amoghdwivedi
Sep 30, 2024
9 min read

Updated: Nov 12, 2024

omg, literally the same thing! L: "lemonrinse" Max patch; R: me presumably improvising something deep

On the surface the two seem distant to each other- the term 'generative' is often exclusively used by electronic musicians and may be used to describe bleepsy-bloopsy music that produces music through some kind of computer programming, while improvised music typically refers to the more traditional practice of playing a physical instrument and expressing yourself freely in the moment. Having made good progress and having achieved decent results in both paradigms during my undergraduate degree, I want to claim that the two are not dissimilar.

Generative music and improvisation

Generative music is like improvised music because it sounds different every time the music presents itself. Every time a generative patch is executed, it produces varying musical results in real time, just like an improvising musician who can spontaneously play unplanned musical ideas in the current moment. This is unlike the nature of composed pieces (without indeterminacy 😉) or produced tracks (without elements of randomness 😉), which sound identical every time.

When you make generative music, you are provoked you to create a system which consistently reproduces varying and acceptable musical outcomes, and similarly, when you improvise, you are expected to be able to play several varying ideas in the musical idiom you are working with. Musical actions are executed based on computer-generated probability in the case of generative music, or your physical/aural/mental intuition in the case of improvised music- both involve varying levels of randomness and uncertainty, which can be very exciting and invigorating. You don’t necessarily know what will happen next, and it feels kind of thrilling.

In both cases you always have a framework to work with and are not in some kind of a vacuum. It is a misunderstanding to believe that generative music- or indeed improvised jazz, for instance- originates out of nothing or that all of it is completely, absolutely novel. The possibilities in generative music are often predefined, and the overall output is a result of a known, deliberately constructed sonic language. Just as jazz improvisation comes from a known, deliberately studied musical language from which the player draws typical and acceptable musical choices (e.g. I know what rhythms, melodies, harmonies, etc. to play over Autumn Leaves because I understand the framework and know the language), generative music too involves predefining the total range of sonic output through some kind of pre-programming, (e.g. I know the overall range of rhythmic, pitch, and harmonic content of my patch, as well as the framework, because I have defined and programmed all of it).

heyyy i coded this! all 4 people are listening to something slightly different. "traintrip".

To be particular, let’s say a jazz student seeks ideas and studies how jazz musicians such as Wynton Kelly, Chet Baker, and Herbie Hancock improvise on Autumn Leaves. Over the course of a few weeks, the student absorbs several pieces of language, meticulously working through them, one piece of language at a time, and builds a nice musical vocabulary. The student will eventually be able to draw rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic fragments from this Kellyan-Bakerian-Hancockian vocabulary and will subconsciously link several bits of this assimilated language together in order to form a musical narrative in the current moment.

In generative music, you could spend many weeks programming many ideas of your piece, including, but not limited to, several rhythmic/metrical designs, which sets of pitches are available, and how the parameters of your instruments may evolve over time- this is akin to building a vocabulary of musical thoughts. Your generative system can then start to retrieve these ideas from your library, and through varying levels of dependency on either randomness or deterministic procedures, forms a musical narrative in real time.

So, in both improv and generative music, there is a gradually constructed network of ideas whose ultimate goal is to exhibit musical expression in real-time, in the current moment. These ideas are often defined meticulously in isolation, and over time amass into a larger whole of musical ideas- you are in essence building a vocabulary of several different bits of well-defined musical language, which are retrieved when the moment strikes. You then begin to define how these ideas may be used in your own musical context, what pieces of language come after which, and you progressively define the syntax of your piece. This network of ideas may exist either in your brain, as several neurons fire off and guide your intuition, as you play a saxophone; or the network may exist in computer memory, as your CPU generates random numbers, and lists an uncountable number of 0’s and 1’s as instructions for your patch. I think this network of ideas, whether in our soft brains or in a plastic computer, embodies and converges to the same spirit of spontaneity.

Uncertainty is goated 🐑

There are other philosophical similarities between generative and improvised music. The first is what I would call detachment. There is something possessive about being a producer/composer who defines everything and expects the details to present themselves in a pristine condition with every rendering/performance. There is obviously nothing wrong with wanting that, but it is possessive. This preference probably diminishes your ability to handle variety and/or imperfections, and you probably cling to certainty as a factor in your music.

Improvised and generative music both invite a healthy amount of uncertainty in my opinion, and I think that calls for a certain amount of courage as you have to believe in yourself/your system, but it also demands the technical confidence which lets you navigate said uncertainty with ease and fluidity. In addition, the ability to devise several solutions in the same musical context shows a real richness of musical imagination. If you are willing and able to find 10 different ideas over the same chord, if you are willing and able to program 10 different generative ideas within the same soundscape, then you are, besides being merely ambitious, probably more imaginative than the kind of composer/producer who can only think of- and therefore resolves to commit to- just one.

letting loose on "Birk's Works". improvising is such a dangerous feeling!

Too much listening is bad for you 🛑

Next, many composers, and certainly all producers, rely on playback as a means of thinking about their music. I don’t know if listening to playback excessively is conducive to any kind of musical progress. It is easy to sit at a desk for 30 minutes and listen to the same 8 bars of music repeatedly and overthink everything. I’ve been through it, and all of it is mind boggling and can be unproductive. I think this comes from being plugged in constantly, and attempting to find creative impetus by mindless listening, instead of patient thinking or even quick and confident decision-making.

A lot of my time making generative music was spent coding abstract concepts without any sounds/noise. This forced me to seek clarity about the nature of the music without the unhelpful and surplus repeated listening, which only confused my inner ear and subsequently exhausted the rest of my brain. In improvising too, you are forced to work with small bits of language and explore them thoroughly till you develop the facility of manipulating said bits of language at your will. All of this slow, patient, but clear, isolated, and thoughtful work, is conducive to long term progress. Another amazing part of learning how to improvise is to transcribe other players, which enriches your musical life by exposing you to a wealth of ideas.

It's just better 🤩

In composition and production, thinking abstractly, focusing on small musical tasks, and transcribing, are rarer activities. In generative and improvised music, these tasks are often foundational and are much harder to circumvent. Generative musicians and improvisors keep acquiring new pieces of pieces of language into their vocabulary (while maintaining and refining old ones) over time in a deliberate fashion. Seeking a multiplicity of solutions by pursuing these meaningful foundational tasks can result in a more free-flowing musicality, one that is neither too attached to singular results nor incapable of imagining many acceptable outcomes to the same problems.

I really do think both types of music-making made me aware of the nature of my music on a different- if not deeper- level in some ways. As a composer I probably pieced together many compositions in a somewhat painstaking manner, note-by-note, and almost like sprinting desperately to a finish line. I tended to haphazardly declare details instead of thoughtfully thinking about the principles through which those details arose, and the final product was this one-off composition that was unintentionally inconsistent in its own syntax. Compare this kind of composer who writes an acceptable melody once every 5 minutes, as opposed to a jazz musician who improvises an acceptable melody instantly. Being able to reproduce/improvise good solutions in a given framework, not just instantly, but also consistently, is no joke, and requires a long and intense pursuit of musicality in a different way, and this results in an increased awareness of what melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, phrasing choices are appropriate in your idiom.

To me the difference between painstaking, note-by-note, tunnel-vision-type composition and fluid musical improvisation/generation is the same as the difference between being able to write a sentence very slowly, and speaking conversationally. Both have their time and place, but I think the latter is much less common in a musical sense and remains a mystery to many musicians. Additionally, a lot of people are unfortunately intimidated by improvising (jazz in particular), but also programming ("do I need to know math?”). This prevents many musicians from developing an appreciation for different modes of music making and is even self-limiting in some ways.

Personal reflection 🧘‍♂️

There are many other tangents to be discussed regarding these musical phenomena. In my experience, with both improvised jazz and generative music, I usually repeatedly listen to one take of a certain performance. That means that I am, in effect, consuming both improvised and generative music, which uniquely blossom out of uncertainty, as if they were prerecorded compositions. In reality, I am only consuming one possible trajectory of the way the music could have been.

So why do I even like these kinds of music then, if I consume them in the same way as determinate compositions or produced beats? I think the answer has to do with the actual music-making process, rather than the end musical product- I tend to savor the skills which allow me to experience generative/improvised music more than whether or not I get to experience the variabliity of musical output intrinsic to these genres. Seeking this kind of musical competence, which allows me to express my thoughts spontaneously and perform without the need of rote memorization, is really satisfying. I love the idea of just showing up, and improvising something in an arbitrarily picked key. Likewise, following that sentiment, I am intrigued by programming a system that generates music, because that means I am clearly outlining in direct steps how to have someone else- a computer- improvise. That’s pretty deep.

I have an arbitrary desire to do things that are challenging, and maybe that’s another reason I got attracted to both jazz improv and generative music- I understood neither and was up for the challenge. I was more familiar with composition and production as opposed to improv and generative techniques, like most people. But achieving success in the latter pair and developing my skills from the ground up made the success feel sweeter than usual.

You can certainly scrutinize me for many things I have said here. In the case of composition, you could ask me to praise those composers who task themselves with creating an individualized syntax for each piece, rather than exaggerating the jazz player's imagination which only allows the same ii-V ideas over jazz standards, many of which have identical harmonic patterns. Jazz people strictly playing standards also don't create their own framework, while composers create both framework AND the material which exists within it. With generative music, there are spectrums of 'generativeness'- it may not be very deep to merely to assign a 50% trigger probability to a kickdrum and subsequently envision this to have the same kind of complexity as building a library of musical thoughts in jazz or composition. Needless to say, there are also things that production and composition make you think of that improvisation may not, like handling multiple musical parts, thinking of form on a much longer time scale, etc., but if I try to be too nuanced this post may never end!

Conclusion! 👋

All of this is not to say making beats or writing ‘fixed’ composition is easy or shallow. Just as there are beat makers who struggle with musicality due to a music theory deficiency, and just as there are classical musicians who cannot improvise simple melodies in C major, surely there are jazz musicians who can't operate a DAW properly, and generative musicians who can’t compose convincingly.

Obviously, none of these skills is better or worse- it just depends on what you are seeking and what you value, and how you want to spend your time, given the skills and opportunities you have. But new perspectives can inform your old ones- improvising music for instance made me more confident in accepting my materials for composition and aided the practical problem of ‘getting things going’, and I felt like I could write music a little faster.

Both generative music and improvised jazz have been musical blessings in my life. They have given me both courage and confidence to embrace unpredictability and arbitrariness, alongside deeper musical insights I would have never experienced through composition/production alone. I can see myself staying committed to these idioms for a long time and feel excited about how much my vocabulary can still grow in the future.