The following talk was given by Brian Eno at the Imagination Conference
in San Francsico, June 8, 1996. Billed as a progressive interactive event
featuring original multimedia presentations the Imagination conference featured
musician and artist Brian Eno, movie producer and
director Spike Lee, and performance artist and musician
Laurie Anderson. Each of the three presented their work and ideas in their
own way. Brian Eno spoke about a new form of music - Generative Music -
and traced it's roots and the development of his ideas on it from the mid-sixties
until now. Laurie Anderson played music and sang/performed
a set arranged for the evening. In Motion Magazine thanks Capretta
Communications in San Francisco for all their help in getting us into the
conference and providing materials for this coverage.
What I am talking about tonight is an idea that really began for me about
25 years ago and has pretty much obsessed me ever since. It began as a musical
idea, it began as something I heard in music and gradually I realized that
in fact it was an idea that was occurring in all sorts of areas. In the
course of this talk what I would like to do is to trace the history of that
idea in my own work and in the work of some other people and also to show
how the idea suddenly branches out, opens up, and becomes a metaphor for
what I consider a very important new body of thinking. I have 45 minutes
to do this and I have a clock here as well.
In the mid-sixties, something happened in modern music which really made
a division between what had happened prior to that and what was now starting
to happen. At the time it was called the new tonalism, or the new tonality.
It was a movement away from the classical tradition which had sort of defined
progress with becoming more atonal, becoming more chaotic and in a sense
becoming less musical in the sense that ordinary people would understand
the word music.
In the mid-sixties, Terry Reilly, Steve Reich, Philip Glass and several
others began working with tonal music again. Simple chords, simple intervals,
rhythmns that you could follow that weren't in 15/8 and things like that
(laughter). Music in fact you could almost dance to.
At the time, the distinguishing characteristic of that music seemed to be
that it was tonal, as opposed to atonal. Over the course of time, since
then I think another important characteristic has emerged. It was very clear
in the first major piece of Terry Reilly called In C. Most of you
probably know of this piece or some of you probably know it, and many of
you may have played it. It's a very famous piece of music. It consists of
52 bars of music written in the key of C. And the instructions to the musicians
are "proceed through those bars at any speed you choose". So you
can begin on bar one, play that for as many times as you want, 20 or 30
times, then move to bar 2, if you don't like that much just play it once,
go on to bar three.
The important thing is each musician move through it at his or her own speed.
The effect of that ofcourse is to create a very complicated work of quite
unpredictable combinations. If this is performed with a lot of musicians
you get a very dense and fascinating web of sound as a result. It's actually
a beautiful piece and having listened to it again recently I think it's
stood the test of time very well. That piece however was not the one which
blew my socks off.
That dubious credit goes to another piece of music by a composer called
Steve Reich. I think it was his earliest recorded piece. It's a piece called
It's Gonna Rain, and I would like to listen to a bit of that now.
(It's Gonna Rain played.)
For many years I was the only person I knew who thought that was a beautiful
piece of music (laughter). It's quite a long piece, it's about 17
minutes long. It's produced by a very, very simple process. It's a loop
of a preacher saying "It's gonna rain". Identical copies of the
loop are being played on two machines at once. Because of the inconsistency
of the speed of the machines they gradually slip out of sync with one another.
They start to sound like an echo. Then they.sound like a cannon, and gradually
they start to sound like all sorts of things.
The piece is very, very interesting because it's tremendously simple. It's
a piece of music that anybody could of made. But the results, sonically,
are very complex. What happens when you listen to that piece is that your
listening brain becomes habituated in the same way that your eye does if
you stare at something for a very long time. If you stare at something for
a very long time your eye very quickly cancels the common information, stops
seeing it, and only notices the differences. This is what happens with that
piece of music.
Quite soon you start hearing very exotic details of the recording itself.
For instance you are aware after several minutes that there are thousands
of trumpets in there - this is without drugs. With drugs there would probably
be millions (laughter). You also become aware that there are birds,
there really are birds -- in the original loop of tape there are some pigeons
or something and they become very prominent as the thing goes on. Most of
all, if you know how the piece is made, what you become aware of is that
you are getting a huge amount of material and experience from a very, very
simple starting point..
Now this completely intrigued me. Partly because I"ve always been lazy,
I guess. So I've always wanted to set things in motion that would produce
far more than I had predicted. Now the Reich piece is really a ... what
would be called visually a moire pattern.
Can I have the over-head projector please?
Now a moire pattern is when you overlay two identical grids with one another.
Here's one, here's the other. Now when I overlay them, see what happens,
you get a very complicated interaction. you get something that actually
you wouldn't have predicted from these two orginal identical sheets of paper.
This is actually a very good analog of the Steve Reich piece in action.
Something happens because of one's perception rather than because of anything
physically happening to these two sheets of plastic which produce an effect
that you simply couldn't have expected or predicted.
I was so impressed by this as a way of composing that I made many, many
pieces of music using more complex variations of that. In fact all of the
stuff that is called ambient music really -- sorry, all the stuff I released
called ambient music (laughter), not the stuff those other 2 1/2
million people released called ambient music, -- all of my ambient music
I should say, really was based on that kind of principle, on the idea that
it's possible to think of a system or a set of rules which once set in motion
will create music for you.
Now the wonderful thing about that is that it starts to create music that
you've never heard before. This is an important point I think. If you move
away from the idea of the composer as someone who creates a complete image
and then steps back from it, there's a different way of composing. It's
putting in motion something and letting it make the thing for you.
One of the first pieces I did like that is called "Music for Airports"
(applause) , thank you very much. (Shows graphic of Music
for Airports). This is in fact a picture of the alien fleet that
abducted me last time I was in San Francisco (laughter), and that's
the mother ship just there. It was an awfull experience because they stole
all my hair (laughter). In fact this really a diagram of Music
for Airports.
Music for Airports, at least one of the pieces on there, is structurally
very, very simple. There are sung notes, sung by three women and my self.
One of the notes repeats every 23 1/2 seconds. It is in fact a long loop
running around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank's studio.
The next lowest loop repeats every 25 7/8 seconds or something like that.
The third one every 29 15/16 seconds or something. What I mean is they all
repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable -- they are not likely
to come back into sync again.
So this is the piece moving along in time. Your experince of the piece ofcourse
is a moment in time, there. So as the piece progresses, what you hear are
the various clusterings and configurations of these six basic elements.
The basic elements in that particular piece never change. They stay the
same. But the piece does appear to have quite a lot of variety. In fact
it's about eight minutes long on that record, but I did have a thirty minute
version which I would bore friends who would listen to it.
The thing about pieces like this ofcourse is that they are actually of almost
infinite length if the numbers involved are complex enough. They simply
don't ever re-configure in the same way again. This is music for free in
a sense. The considerations that are important, then, become questions of
how the system works and most important of all what you feed into the system.
I think that the classical composers who came to this way of composing have
not thought it about very much. They accepted given instruments and invented
systems to reconfigure them. To me that was an important part of it. I think
coming from pop music, which ofcourse is a music more than anything else
about sound, and about the possibilities of sound in studios, coming to
doing this from that background, I think I was well equipped for that.
Music for Airports came out in 1978 to howls of neglect (laughter)
in fact it didn't do at all well in England. But it did do quite well here
by comparison. I have an eternal debt to the United States for actually
cheering me up a little bit when that record came out. In fact I was so
depressed about the response to the record and the other stuff I'd been
doing in England that I decided to move to America for a few years, which
might be the sign of a weak-willed person who lives off flattery but, you
know, there you go (laughter).
One of the first places I came to was San Francisco, I lived here for a
while. In fact I practically lived in the Exploratorium. (laughter and
applause) I have my exploratorium instant moire in my pocket (laughter).
If you haven't visited the exploratorium in the last month you should go
-- it's really a good place. If every city had one of those the world would
be a much better place.
In the exploratorium the thing that absolutely hooked me in the same way
as the Steve Reich piece had hooked me was a simple computer demonstration.
It was the first thing I'd ever seen on a computer actually, of a game invented
by an English mathematician called John Conway. The game was called Life.
Modest title for a game.
Life is a very simple game, unlike the one we're in. It only actually
has a few rules, which I will now tell you. You divide up an area into squares.
You won't see the squares on the demonstration I'm about to do. And a square
can either be dead or alive. There's a live square. Here's another one.
There's another one. There's another one there.
The rules are very simple. In the next generation, the next click of the
clock, the squares are going to change statuses in some way or another.
The square which has one or zero neighbors is going to die, a live square
that has one or zero neighbors is going to die. A square which has two neighbors
is going to survive. A square with three neighbors is going to give birth,
is going to come alive, if it isn't already alive. A square with four or
more neighbors is going to die of over crowding.
These are terribly simple rules and you would think it probably couldn't
produce anything very interesting. Conway spent apparently about a year
finessing these simple rules. They staretd out much more complicated than
that. He found that those were all the rules you needed to produce something
that appeared life-like.
What I have over here, if you can now go to this Mac computer, please. I
have a little group of live squares up there. When I hit go I hope they
are going to start behaving according to those rules. There they go. I'm
sure a lot of you have seen this before. What's interesting about this is
that so much happens. The rules are very, very simple, but this little population
here will reconfigure itself, form beautiful patterns, collapse, open up
again, do all sorts of things. It will have little pieces that wander around,
like this one over here. Little things that never stop blinking, like these
ones. What is very interesting is that this is extremely sensitive to the
conditions in which you started. If I had drawn it one dot different it
would have had a totally different history. This is I think counter-intuitive.
One's intuition doesn't lead you to believe that something like this would
happen. Okay that's now settled (looking at screen), that will never
change from that. It's settled to a fixed condition. I'll just show you
another one. I'll show you this one in color because it looks nice. A little
treat. (Laughter).
At the Exploratorium, I spent literally weeks playing with this thing. Which
just goes to show how idle you can be if you're unemployed. I was so fascinated,
I wanted to train my intuition to grasp this. I wanted this to become intuitive
to me. I wanted to be able to understand this message that I'd found in
the Steve Reich piece, in the Reilly piece, in my own work, and now in this.
Very, very simple rules, clustering together, can produce very complex and
actually rather beautiful results. I wanted to do that becuase I felt that
this was the most important new idea of the time. Since then I have become
more convinced of that, and actually I hope I can partly convince you of
that tonight.
Life was the first thing I ever saw on a computer that interested
me. Almost the last actually, as well. (laughter). For many, many
years I didn't see anything else. I saw all sorts of work being done on
computers, that I thought was basically a reiteration of things that had
been better done in other ways. Or that were pointlessly elaborate. I didn't
see many things that had this degree of class to them. A very simple beginnings
and a very complex endings.
At the same time as I was working with Life I was also starting to
some new pieces of music that used the moire principle, but in a much more
sophisticated way. So now I have go back to the overhead (screen). What
I started to do was make moires of different types of elements. Not only
of single notes or similar sounds, but moires of basically rules about how
sounds were made. This gave me some very much more interesting results.
As you can see (manipualating lines and shapes on the overhead) Here's
two simple cycles going out of phase, here's a wiggly one going out of phase,
and then halleluja - New Age music (laughter) for which I am consistently
being blamed (laughter).
You can start to build very beautifully complex webs of things from very
simple initial ingredients. What I would like to do is play you a piece
called Neroli which was released five years ago or something which
was another version of this way of working. I've only ever had one idea
really, and that was this, and everything I'm going to play was a version
of this idea. Can you put on Neroli please. I'll leave this running
because it's a very good piece to talk over.
Can you now put on this Mac, please.
The next thing I ever saw on a computer that really astonished me was a
screen-saver by a local lad called Gene Tantra. I don't now if he's here
tonight I really wanted to invite him but I didn't have his number. He made
a screen-saver for the aptly named Dim company After Dark. This screen-saver
which they only released in one of their files because it's clearly much
too good to come out very often was called Stained Glass. Stained
Glass unlike almost all other screen-savers looks at its own history.
Stained Glass generates images, then it sucks them out, multiplies
them, chops them about, collages them together in different ways.
I realized that if you put other screen-savers in the center of Stained
Glass, then it would do the same thing to them. What you have is a visual
generative piece.
I've got three versions of Stained Glass. There's one along the top
there (pointing to overhead screen), this square is another. And
then this oblong is a third. At the center of these two is a different screen-saver
called Doodles. Now someone in a London magazine, when I said I'd
spent a long time looking at screen-savers described this as "rather
sad" (laughter) with that infallible cynicism that we English
are so good at.
But the reason I was looking at them so closely was because again they picked
up that thread of something that uses a tiny amount of information, a minute
amount of your computer's processing power, and produces something that
for me is thirty times as beautiful as anything I've seen off a huge clunky
CD ROM.
I quickly realized that for me this was the future for computers. Computers
seen not as ways of crunching huge quantities of data or storing enormous
ready-made forests of material, but computers are the way of growing little
seeds.
This piece here, this Stained Glass is a very small seed, in fact
I think it's something like 25 K, now for those of you who know what a K
is will know that 25 of them isn't very many(laughter). This is the
kind of precise scientific language you can expect this evening (laughter).
Just to give you an impression, a CD ROM is, ohh, very much bigger than
that (laughter). I've never actually worked this out. Something like
30,000 times more information on a CD ROM, I suppose, than is needed to
make this work. I think this is about 30,000 times as interesting actually.
Partly because it never repeats itself. This thing will go on genrating
like this, and it will stay pretty much the same, but it will never be identical.
This suits me fine. I don't want big surprises. *I want a certain level
of surprise - I'm too old for big surprises, now. (laughter) - after
those aliens.
I thought this has got to be the future of computer music. I've seen so
many things done on computers that were hopelessly overwrought and complicated
and in the end sounded like what I call bubble and squeak music. Or on the
other hand, sounded like typical sequencer music, sequencer music where
everythng is bolted together and it's all completely, rigidly locked. It
would have been great in the 1930s, I'm sure, that music.
I wanted something that had an organic quality to it. Had some sense of
movement and change. Every time you played it something slightly different
happened.
So, screen-savers. In fact Gene Tantra's, as I was saying was the first
thing that I saw like that. Subsequently I saw another one by another local
lad called Greg Jarvit which is called Bliss, which is another very
very interesting system. Both of those things really impressed me. Mostly
because they were economical. I am so thrilled my anything economical. It's
so easy not to be economical and anything that uses a very small amount
of information smartly impresses me.
I came to California a couple of years ago with the idea that the right
approach to using this new medium called CD ROM was to actually use it not
as a way of, as I said storing forests which you then, tediously navigate
through. It takes you four minutes to see another bottom on the Prince video
(laughter), but I thought how much more exciting it would be to see
something that happened like that, immediately, and furthermore happened
in a way that you'd never seen it happen before. It seemed to me that this
was the answer. To some how use the CD ROM as a way of planting seeds into
your computer, and then using the computer to grow those seeds for you.
In fact, although this abstract, Tai Roberts from ION proved to me that
it could also be done figuratively, it doesn't have to be abstract. I don't
have an example of that, in an afternoon Tai managed to put together an
animation of a figure which was a generative animation, that's to say it
didn't rely on calling up a stored video, it relied on having a very small
seed and then performing certain operations. They were actually twists and
turns from Photoshop performed live on to this seed. In a sense the theory
was vindicated, but only in a sense because it never got made in that way.
I went back to England not really having seen the musical thing I'd hoped
to find. I had come with a whole proposal for how to make a sort of generative
musical system in a computer. It was a muddled proposal because I don't
know enough about computers to frame it properly. But it was fairly detailed
and fairly accurate to what has since happened.
When I got back to England, about a year afterwards a letter camer through
from some people called Sseyo, a company called Sseyo, located in exotic,
sunless Beaconsfield, which is about 25 miles north of London. I had been
imagining that I would find the answer in San Francisco, but in fact these
guys were working just up the M1 (laughter).
They sent me a demo of something they had done. It was a music generating
system. I listened to this CD and there were a couple of pieces on it that
were clearly in my style. In fact it turned out that they were followers
of my music. The interesting thing to me was that the pieces that were in
my style were actually very good examples of my style. In fact they were
rather better than any I had recently done (laughter). I was rather
impressed by this.
I got in touch with them and the next example is really the center of this
talk - which is lucky because I'm about half-way through on the clock. Now
I need the PC please (to the control room) - it's only available
on PC, I'm sorry to say. (Hissing from audience.) Yes I thoroughly
agree, the people from Sseyo are here tonight - hiss louder. We have one
supporter of the PC system in the front row here - he's wearing a white
t-shirt ... (laughter).
This is a very, very interesting system. It allows you to specify a set
of instruments. I should first tell you a little about it technically. This
is a computer (laughter). In there there's a sound card -- that's
to say a little synthesizer. And this computer tells that little synthesizer
what to play according to the rules that I've set in here. Now these rules
cover all sorts of things that you might want to do musically. They cover
very obvious things like what scale is the piece in. And just to show what
that looks like ... this is slightly re-configured since I last looked at
it. These are scales. Now if I want to have a little bit of minor second
in my scale I can do that. A little of this, a bit of that, and a little
bit of that, and some of that, and some more of that, and so on and so on.
I show you that to indicate that all of the rules are probablistic -- that
is to say they are rules that define a kind of envelope of possibilities.
The machine is going to improvise within a set of rules, which is to say
there's a greater chance that it's going to play a fifth, than a flat fifth
for example. And so on and so on.
There are rules concerning harmony, that is to say, and a second harmony,
play a flat fifth harmony. There are rules concerning how it would move
from note to note. Will it move in big steps, or small steps, and in fact
in this piece here I have some of the instruments are going to move by big
steps, and some by quite small steps. There are a hundred and fifty of these
kinds of rules. They govern major considerations like the basic quality
of the piece to quite minor ones like exactly how the note wobbles. I'll
play you a bit - is this thing up? - He cried to the empty void (laughter).
This piece of music, which is quite unpredictable and sometimes has quite
large gaps in it, as it has chosen to do right now, it's embarassing, this
music is making itself now. It is not a recording, and I have never heard
it play exactly this before. If you don't believe me I'll start it again.
See. It will start.
This piece, I guess I've listened to for a couple of hundred hours or so.
I often have it running in my studio, while I'm making records. It's a very
satisfying piece of music. It carries on rebuilding itself. It sometimes
pulls a surprise, like this. There's one very exotic harmony that can only
occur under particular conditions and occasionally it pulls it out. What
interesting to me is that again it's very economical. You can can use the
computer in many other ways while you're doing this. If you want to use
it as a word processor, it'll carry on making the music in the background.
I'll play you a part of another piece just to show you that it can do other
things. They are so unpredictable, it's very difficult just to play to people
because you can switch it on and say listen to this, and nothing happens.
Having started working with this system I am so thrilled by it. I think
there are other generative music systems, but I happen to understand this
one and I know it's a good one. I'm so thrilled by it that it is very difficult
for me to listen to records anymore. Putting on a record and knowing I'm
going to hear the same thing I did last time has actually become a little
bit irksome. It feels quite Victorian to do that (laughter). I think
this has really moved up into a new phase of music.
You know up until about a hundred years ago people never heard the same
music twice. Ofcourse it was always different. When recording appeared,
suddenly you had the wonderful luxury of being able to play music wherever
you wanted to, and control it in various ways. But ofcourse it was always
the same thing. And now you have this thing which is kind of a new hybrid
where you can play the music wherever you want just like a record, but it
won't be the same thing each time. This is actually very thrilling I think.
Now whether you like the music or not is another issue. This just happens
to be the music I make. It doesn't have to sound like this, just to console
you (laughter). It's very good for making techno and all that sort
of thing as well. I was informed on the radio the other day that I was the
father of industrial music - which is not something I've been accused of
before (laughter).
I started thinking about the differences between generative and what I would
call classical or symphonic music - I have not really decided on a name
for the rest of it. And these are the differences. It's not either or. Music
can be anywhere along a line between these two.
Classical music, like classical architecture, like many other classical
forms, specifies an entity in advance and then builds it. Generative music
doesn't do that, it specifies a set of rules and then lets them make the
thing. In the words of Kevin Kelly's great book, generative music is out
of control, classical music is under control.
Now, out of control means you don't know quite what it's apt to do. It has
it's own life. Generative music is unpredictable, classical music is predicted.
Generative unrepeatable, classical repeatable. Generative music is unfinished,
that's to say, when you use generative you implicitly don't know what the
end of this is. This is an idea from architects also, from a book called
How Buildings Learn, the move of architecture away from the job of
making finished monumental entities toward the job of making things that
would then be finished by the users, constantly refinished in fact by the
users. This is a more humble and much more interesting job for the architect.
Generative music is sensitive to circumstances, that is to say it will react
differently depending on its initial condition, on where it's happening
and so on. Where classical music seeks to subdue them. By that I mean classical
music seeks a neutral battleground, the flat field. It won't be comfortable
-- with a fixed reverbaration, -- not too many emergencies, and people who
don't cough during the music basically.
Generative forms in general are multi-centered. There's not a single chain
of command which runs from the top of the pyramid to the rank and file below.
There are many, many, many web-like modes which become more or less active.
You might notice the resemblance here to the difference between broadcasting
and the Internet, for example.
You never know who made it. With this generative music that I played you,
am I the composer? Are you if you buy the system the composer? Is Jim Coles
(?) and his brother who wrote the software the composer? -- Who actually
composes music like this? Can you describe it as composition exactly when
you don't know what it's going to be?
Why does an idea like this grab my attention so much? I said at the beginning
that what I thought was important about this idea was that it keeps opening
out. This notion of a self-generating system, or organisms, keeps becoming
a richer and richer idea for me. I see it happening in more and more places.
I think what artists do, and what people who make culture do, is somehow
produce simulators where new ideas like this can be explored. If you start
to accept the idea of generative music, if you take home one of my not-available-in-the-foyer
packs and play it at home, and you know that this is how this thing is made,
you start to change your concept about how things can be organized. What
you've done is moved into a new kind of metaphor. How things are made, and
how they evolve. How they look after themselves.
Evolving metaphors, in my opinion, is what artists do. They produce work
that gives you the chance to experience in a safe environment, because nothing
really happens to you when you looking at artwork, they give you the chance
to experience what might be quite dangerous and radical new ideas. They
give you a chance to step out of real life into simulator life. A metaphor
is a way of explaining something that we've experienced in a set of terms,
a different set of terms.
There's a very interesting book by Lakoff and Johnson, that famous thirties
singing team, it's a book about metaphor, it's called Metaphors We Live
By. They give a very clear example of the effect of metaphor. They say
we use in our culture the metaphor, argument is war. All of our language
about argument "she defeated him", "he attacked her position",
so on and so on, they are all arguments that relate to fighting.
When we think about the process of arguing, we tend to then reconstrue our
possibilities in terms of that metaphor. What Lakoff and Johnson say is
suppose that somebody had said argument is dance, suppose that was the dominant
metaphor. So instead of it being seen you have the process where one person
defeats another, it becomes a process where two people together make something
beautiful between them. We could have that metaphor for argument, we don't.
But do you understand that a shift of that kind produces an entirely different
kind of discourse. How the the shift from one way of dealing in activity
that we all engage in to another changes that activity. Suddenly our language
of possibilities is renewed and different.
What I'm saying, I suppose, when I talk about these things here (on his
chart of the differences between generative and classical musics), I'm
saying we're saddled with a whole set of metaphors that belong over here.
Those are our metaphors about how the world works, how things organize themselves,
how things are controlled, what possibilities there are. Generative art
in general is a way of not throwing those out, we don't get rid of old metaphors,
we expand them to include more. These things still have value, but we want
to include these things as well.
My feeling about artists is that we are metaphor explorers of some kind.
... An object of culture does all of the following, it innovates, it recycles,
it clearly and explicitly rejects, and it ignores. Any artist's work that
is doing all those four things and is doing all those four things through
the metaphors that dominate our thinking.