V&A Forever Excerpt

A 3.5 minute excerpt of the fully generative, never repeating music composition system for Universal Everything's V&A Forever installation in the John Madejski garden of the Victoria & Albert Museum London (Nov 2008 - Feb 2009). The music was composed in realtime (in Java/OpenAL) using a custom developed generative system which strategically picked instruments from a library of approx. 250 single-note base samples, designed by Simon Pyke (@freefarm). These samples are then algorithmically arranged in real time into polyrhythms, chords, melodies of varying densities & intensities. All of these rhythms, chord progressions, the melodic phrases themselves, repetitions, transpositions, key & tempo changes are entirely generative & evolving, using a variety of techniques. E.g. cellular automata are playing a central role to generate multitimbral and polyrhythmic melodies/phrases, which then are randomly mutated to produce key changes and entirely new variations over time. The overall tempo of the composition was varied between ~65 - 130 bmp via layered (additive) sine waves, similar to the concept of a biorhythm, creating a larger soft arc/transition to a more up-beat character towards the end of the installation (after 2+ months). I developed a custom GUI tool to allow Simon and me to define the macro configuration of the composition system, assign individual metadata for each of the 250 instruments/samples (e.g. pitch/octave ranges, min/max tempos, tags, usage probabilities at certain times, group associations, exclusions with other instruments). It took ~5 months of daily fine tuning and listening to hundreds of hours of generated outputs to create this composition system. Yet, once the installation was live, an entirely new & different (within the parameters) composition resulted and so put us on equal footing with any other visitor/listener. Project documentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ988B5vlyo Generative music composition system & algorithms: Karsten Schmidt. Sound design: Simon Pyke. Creative direction: Matt Pyke