a hundred quirky legs

A misconception by people unfamiliar with algorithmic composition ist that it’s about removing the musician from the music making process. For me it’s the opposite: it’s a mechanism for creating flow, a constant feedback loop between having an intuition, abstracting it into rules and the sound resulting from that abstraction. Classic composition lacks that rapid feedback element: having an idea, writing it down. Eventually musicians will play it and you’ll learn from that, or you use a music notation software to play it back to you. But for me nothing creates a dance like creating a simple system and then observing and reacting to its behaviour in real time. You’re alert, always on edge in the most positive sense.

See also: What I’m learning from learning to juggle [Updated: July 9, 2018]

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Image credit: Cogwheels and pebbles by Carlos Lorenzo