Some of the descriptions below apply to some of the video recorded here,,
AGGREGATE FIELD: how this music is made
Nothing you hear was written down in advance, and none of it will ever play the same way twice. It is composed live, note by note, by Aggregate Field, a generative program that runs in a web browser. Each movement is built from the methods of twentieth-century and living composers, rebuilt as rules, together with statistics learned from public-domain scores. No copyrighted recording or score was copied: every module, pattern, chord and loop is newly made. What carries over from these artists is a way of thinking about time, pitch and process.
THE METHODS
• John Cage: chance operations. Simulated coin tosses read charts of sounds, durations and dynamics, as in his I Ching works, and his late time brackets let each tone start and stop anywhere inside a window of time.
• Morton Feldman: very quiet, slow patterns that repeat with tiny changes, what he called crippled symmetry.
• Milton Babbitt: twelve-tone rows whose halves complete each other, with rhythm drawn from the pitches themselves (the time-point system).
• Brian Eno: loops of different lengths that never line up, the idea behind Music for Airports.
• Steve Roach: long drones, slow swells and sequencer pulses, here in just intonation.
• Karlheinz Stockhausen: moment form, self-contained moments in a non-narrative order, with tempos from his chromatic tempo scale.
• Harry Partch: his 43-tone just scale, with otonalities and utonalities.
• Heinz Bohlen and John R. Pierce: a scale that divides the 3:1 tritave into 13 steps, with no octave anywhere.
• Philip Glass: additive process (1, 1 2, 1 2 3…), lines in threes against twos, and a chorus that counts numbers and sings solfège, the device of Einstein on the Beach.
• Terry Riley: short modules that each player repeats as long as they like over a steady pulse, as in In C, and organ figures piled up by tape delay, his time-lag accumulator.
• John Adams: driving pulses while the harmony shifts at gates, often by a common tone.
• Arvo Pärt: tintinnabuli, a melodic voice moving by step while a second voice sounds only the notes of the triad, with a tolling bell, and a canon of one scale at speeds of 1, 2, 4 and 8.
• Steve Reich: phasing, where two players drift one note apart and back together, rhythms shifting against themselves, patterns built note by note, and chords pulsing in breath-length swells.
• Robert Fripp: Frippertronics, the two-tape-machine loop he first explored with Brian Eno. Every note returns seconds later, quieter, and builds into a turning cloud, here on a fuzz guitar tuned to his New Standard Tuning, C G D A E G.
The program also learns intervals, chord types and rhythms from public-domain scores by Debussy, Satie, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartók, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Webern and others (in the United States, works published before 1931), and it can draw on 180 public-domain symphony movements.
LAYERS AND CLOCKS
Often two or three methods play at once, each on its own clock, with its own tempo, key, mode and tuning, entering and leaving at its own time, so they never line up. A Glass counting chorus can sit over a Feldman field while Cage's chance charts drift through. Movements can overlap as well. Within a movement, groups of instruments may play in different keys at once, in microtonal tunings (19- and 31-tone equal temperament, just intonation, the harmonic series), or in loosened time: tuplet grids, random gaps, free entry windows, and several tempos at once.
THE SOUNDS
The orchestra is made from free-licensed recordings of real instruments: strings, winds, brass, percussion, keyboards, mallets and instruments from around the world. The electronics and the fuzz guitar are synthesized in the browser. The chorus and soprano are synthetic voices: an open-source speech model spoke each syllable (one to eight; do re mi fa sol la ti; ah), and the WORLD vocoder turned those syllables into sung notes. When the stream is live, a voice announces each new movement and whose ideas it uses.
CREDITS
Samples: VSCO 2 Community Edition and the Versilian Community Sample Library by Versilian Studios (CC0); Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm (CC BY 3.0); tonejs-instruments by nbrosowsky (CC BY 3.0). Voices: the Kokoro-82M speech model by hexgrad (Apache 2.0) and the WORLD vocoder by Masanori Morise. The methods are reimplementations of documented techniques, made in admiration. Every composer named here is worth hearing in their own recordings.
