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Unidentified Sound Object SEPTEMBER 19, 2009 - by Matteo Milani

GENERATIVE MUSIC: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER CHILVERS

Generative music is a term popularized by Brian Eno to describe music that is ever-different and changing, and that is created by a system. I recently had the chance to interview musician and software designer Peter Chilvers, who created the new iPhone/iPod touch application called Air.

Based on concepts developed by Brian Eno, with whom Chilvers created Bloom, Air assembles vocal (by Sandra O'Neill) and piano samples into a beautiful, still and ever changing composition, which is always familiar, but never the same.

Air features four "Conduct" modes, which let the user control the composition by tapping different areas on the display, and three "Listen" modes, which provide a choice of arrangement. For those fortunate enough to have access to multiple iPhones and speakers, an option has been provided to spread the composition over several players.

"Air is like Music For Airports made endless, which is how I always wanted it to be." - Brian Eno

Matteo Milani: Thanks for your time. Peter Chilvers as a musician first: few words about A Marble Calm project.

Peter Chilvers: I happened across the phrase "A Marble Calm" on holiday a few years ago, thought it sounded like an interesting band name, then started thinking about the type of band that might be. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to tie up a number of ideas that were interesting to me: drifting textural ambient pieces, improvisation and song. By making it a loose collective, it's enabled me to bring in other vocalists and musicians I've enjoyed working with on other projects - vocalists Sandra O'Neill (who also worked with me on Air for the iPhone) and Tim Bowness, marimba player Jon Hart and flautist Theo Travis.

MM: When did you start working with generative music?

PC: In the '90's I worked as a software developer on the Creatures series of games. When we started on Creatures 2, I was given the opportunity to take over the whole soundtrack. The game wasn't remotely linear - you spent arbitrary amounts of time in different locations around an artificial world, so I wanted to create a soundtrack that acted more as a landscape. I ended developing a set of "virtual improvisers", constantly generating an ambient soundscape in the background - it was quite involved actually, with its own simple programming language, although little of that was visible to the user.

MM: Why did you choose the Apple platform to develop the applications?

PC: I've been a huge fan of Apple products for a long time, and their timing in releasing the iPhone couldn't have been better. Bloom actually existed in some form before the iPhone SDK was announced - possibly before even the iPhone itself was announced. From the second we tried running the prototype, it was obvious that it really suited a touch screen. And Apple provided one!

The difficulty developers have faced with generative music to date has been the platform. Generative music typically requires a computer, and it's just not that enjoyable to sit at a computer and listen to music. The iPhone changed that - it was portable, powerful and designed to play music.

MM: Who designed the visualizations of Bloom? Eno himself?

PC: It was something of a two way process. I came up with the effect of circles expanding and disappearing as part of a technology experiment - Brian saw it and stopped me making it more complex! Much of the iPhone development has worked that way - one of us would suggest something and the other would filter it, and this process repeats until we end up with something neither of us imagined. Trope, our new iPhone application, went through a huge number of iterations, both sonically and visually before we were happy with it.

MM: What kind of algorithms define Bloom's musical structure? Are they specifically based on Brian's requests or just an abstraction based on his previous works?

PC: Again, this is something that went back and forth between us a number of times. As you can see, anything you play is repeated back at you after a delay. But the length of that delay varies in subtle, but complex ways, and keeps the music interesting and eccentric. It's actually deliberately "wrong" - you can't play exactly in time with something you've already played, and a few people have mistaken this for a bug. Actually, it was a bug at one point - but Brian liked the effect, and we ended up emphasising it. "Honour they error as a hidden intention" is something of a recurring theme in Brian's work.

A forthcoming update to Bloom adds two new "operation modes", one of which was designed specifically to work with the way Brian prefers playing Bloom.

MM: Does the graphic and audio engine include audio and video standard libraries or you wrote your own classes?

PC: I've built up my own sound engine, which I'm constantly refining and use across all the applications. It went through several fairly substantial rewrites before I found something reliable and reusable.

MM: Is all the code in Objective C or did you use any external application?

PC: It's all Objective C. I hadn't used the language before, although I'd worked extensively in C++ in the past. It's an odd language to get used to, but I really like it now.

MM: Is Bloom sample based? What is music engine actually controlling (e.g. triggering, volume, panning, effects)? What about the algorithmic side of the music engine?

PC: Bloom is entirely sample based. Brian has a huge library of sounds he's created, which I was curating while we were working on the Spore soundtrack and other projects. It's funny, but the ones I picked were just the first I came across that I thought would suit Bloom. We later went through a large number of alternatives, but those remained the best choices.

The version of Bloom that's currently live uses fixed stereo samples, but an update we're releasing soon applies some panning to the sounds depending on the position of each "bloom" on screen. It's a subtle effect, but it works rather well.

MM: Would you like to describe your actual and next projects?

PC: I've been involved in two new applications for the iPhone: Trope and Air. Both Apps were intended to be released simultaneously. Trope is my second collaboration with Brian Eno, and takes some of the ideas from Bloom in a slightly different, slightly darker direction. Instead of tapping on the screen, you trace shapes and produce constantly evolving abstract soundscapes.

Air is a collaboration with Irish vocalist Sandra O'Neill, and is quite different to Bloom. It's a generative work centred around Sandra's vocal textures and a slowly changing image. It draws heavily on techniques that Brian has evolved over his many years working on ambient music and installations, as well as a number of the generative ideas we've developed more recently.

I have just had some interesting news: Trope has been approved, it's now available in the App Store!