Wednesday, May 01, 2019

Is Music Generative?

In my submission to the "Doughnut Economics Way #8" competition, "Money is Software", I posited that language, software, and money are all generative - you can make them arbitrarily complex, without limit. You can always add another adjective or clause to a sentence. So is music also generative?

My initial thought was "No". There are limited notes in a scale, limited number of voices you can add before music becomes cacophony. But then, I thought, "Well, you can always add another guitar solo."

So I'm voting that yes, music is generative. Notes can go from a whole note (1 measure) to a 64th note, and be on or off in every 2^6 pattern. So maybe, mathematically, music is not quite as unconstrained as the other 3 examples, but, at the level of the human mind's comprehension, I posit that it can be treated as generative.

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