Launching today
Irreducible Music
Compose computationally irreducible music
5 followers
Compose computationally irreducible music
5 followers
Irreducible music is inspired by physicist Stephen Wolfram's idea "computational irreducibility". This means that an outcome of some processes, even if based on simple rules, is unknown and cannot be predicted. It can only be known by letting the process play out. Pipe melodies through transforms inspired by ideas from Chaos Theory, Geology and compositional techniques in a chain to get a surprising musical result and outcome. You don't know what will happen until you run the pipeline.
This application applies ideas from Chaos Theory, Complexity Theory, Geology and Stephen Wolfram's concept of computational irreducibility to musical composition. The main inspiration was a desire to have a tool and platform for musical exploration by applying ideas from the complex sciences to music in order to generate potentially useful and interesting derived musical material that otherwise would remain undiscovered.
One of the main ideas that the application draws upon is that a compounding series of iterations in a dynamical system can produce an unpredictable and surprising result - even if the rules for the system are simple (or even deterministic).
A user can enter short melodic Motifs (via defining dimensions of tones or via playing them into the system with a MIDI keyboard) and then pipe them through an arbitrarily composed set of transforms inspired by ideas from physicists like Wolfram (Cellular Automata) or geological processes (Frost Effect/Freeze-Thaw effects that form hoodoos, for example).
Transforms can be deterministic or have stochastic randomly generated effects which adds to the interesting result at the end of the pipeline. You can export the outcome to a WAV or MIDI files to import into a DAW like Cubase or Logic Pro to assign VST instruments for playback. The application has a basic set of internal playback instruments using FluidSynth (Python), but the real power is experimenting with the transforms and if you discover an interesting musical idea that emerges, then you can work with that material more seriously in a DAW.
Long term plans are to continue developing interesting transforms or even build a custom transform generator that would allow users to build their own transforms from scratch to use in the pipeline. My hope is that this tool inspires and delights composers looking to discover and generate new material from musical seeds and melodies they can utilize in their compositions.
The product is free to use, but please consider donating via the Donate links in the app if you find it useful or fun in order to help with server maintenance and development costs.