iPods That Compose Their Own Music, Almost Here

Thank PSFK:

by Dave Pinter

What if instead of downloading music into your iPod, it could just compose a new piece of music for you. What if it sensed the time of day, season, location you were at, and activity you were doing and based the composition around those criteria?

It’s not so far off from happening. Create Digital Music recently speculated about the coming application of generative music in mobile devices. There are already a host of music composition applications and interfaces merging on the iPhone. Others like the soon to launch Mixtikl from Intermorphic will allow composition, performance, and remixing capabilities right from a mobile.

The next step is blending these applications with generative music tools and a loop library to allow the device to make it’s own music. Artists like Brian Eno have experimented with generative compositions before but have been limited by technology. Eno released an album called Generative Music 1 back in 1996 using early Koan software. Contrary to traditional music making, generative music is all about creatively setting up the parameters to allow for interesting results.

If generative music takes off, it might be sometime in the future that we all question how silly it was to classify music in things called genres.

Create Digital Music