Stochastic & Live Coding Music

STOCHASTIC & LIVE CODING MUSIC 

Author: Liang Men 

School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, 

Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Rd, London, E1 4NS. U.K. 

E-mail: <l.men@qmul.ac.uk>. 

Abstract 

Music has long been composed by human beings directly, but today things become different. Stochastic music and live coding provide new ways of composing music. The former provides a quite different mentality of generating music, the latter one affords a method of making music synergistically. 

Traditionally people make music by directly operating musical instrument (e.g. wind instruments and string instruments). Musicians interact with these instruments through touching keys, strings or playing fiddles. Absolutely these ways have provided people a wonderful experience as well as many beautiful results. But this is not enough in today’s world filled with interactive experience. Today the development of technology gives people more possibilities than ever to make a novel experience in the musical field. In this essay, two new ways of generating music, Stochastic Music and Live Coding Music, will be introduced. 

Stochastic Music and Its Founder 

The term Stochastic Music music derived from the book Formalized Music, which is written by Iannis Xenakis, a Greek French composer, music theorist as well as an architect-engineer, in the early 1950s. Stochastic can be seen as a technique of composing or a music genre as well. As one of the modern classical composition methods, Stochastic Music is mainly developed by Iannis Xenakis. It borrows a lot of things from mathematics, for example, the law of large numbers, probability theory, game theory, Boolean algebra, Markov chains, Poisson law, group theory and so on [1]. This knowledge is used to make the indeterminism of music. It should also be noticed that the indeterminism here does not mean Indeterminacy, where the randomness is just randomness, not guided by anything (the mathematical or other laws). At 

the end of Stochastic composing, the indeterminism output will also be marked following a traditional way, e.g., recording on the score. 

Iannix Xenakis and His Work 

Xenakis opened up many research areas and possibilities of a computer in music (the structure and the sound). As a big influencer obviously, many people in this field have been inspired by him a lot. Thus he was seen as not only an important composer who open set up a new area of 20th century classical music but also an important founder who has great effect on the development of electronic and computer music. As a composer as well as an architect, he integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances [2]. He provides us an example of how to use algorithms to generate and manipulate sound, in different levels, form low to high. 

Xenakis has lots of works for different kinds of instruments. For example, Metastasis (1953-54) for orchestra, which contains independent parts for each musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as Psappha (1975) and Pléïades (1979); 

compositions that introduced specialization by dispersing musicians among the audience, such as Terretektorh (1966); electronic works created using Xenakis's UPIC system; and the massive multimedia performances Xenakis called polytopes [2]. And Analogique A et B (for 9 string instruments and tape, 1958-59) is considered one of Xenakis’ most thoroughly formalized compositions [3]. 

He also has a lot of academic writings. Among those writings, a book named Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (French edition 1963, English translation 1971) is seen as one of his most important. It is in this book, that he explains the motivation, philosophy, and technique for composing music with stochastic mathematical functions [4]. 

Other Composers in This Field 

Besides Xenakis, James Tenney (1934-2006, American) and Francisco Guerrero Marín (1951-1997, Spanish) are also quite notable in the field of Stochastic Music. 

Tenney's work deals with perception (For Ann (rising), see Shepard tone), just intonation (Clang, see gestalt), stochastic elements (Music for Player Piano), information theory (Ergodos, see ergodic theory), and with what he called 'swell' (Koan: Having Never Written A Note For Percussion for John Bergamo), which is basically arch form [5]. 

The main aspect in Guerrero's work was the search for musical elements to match natural phenomena. In the scope of his musical work, he studied physical and mathematical principles, most notably the fractal geometry of Benoît Mandelbrot. Some of Guerrero’s works are related to Xenakis, these are Xénias Pacatas (1971–1972) for 18 strings and Xenias Pacatas II (1974) for 2 guitars [6]. 

Stochastic Music Composing Procedure 

In a recent interview with Winston Yeung, a composer in Birmingham, he introduced one of his work Untoched [7]. All the sound in this work is stochastically generated by using computer. The sound is generated quite randomly but then the randomness will be constrained by gesture. For this piece, actually, the sound and structure is composed. But it is more accurate if it is seen as a half-improvised piece music. In this work, 

Yeung tended to use some material with mathematically related techniques, but he also made his own judgment to choose his own material from a large quantity of result generated by the computer. He said in this field the composer has the responsibility to choose what he/she wants, otherwise he/she will lose his/her privilege. 

Fig. 1. Visualisation of the code of one of BEER’s concert. 

Live coding 

Put in the simple term, live coding is the code keeps editable while running. Live coding [8] (sometimes referred to as 'on-the-fly programming' [9], and 'just in time programming') is a performing arts form and a creativity technique centered upon the use of improvised interactive programming. It supports many application scenarios such as creating sound and image based digital media, as well as light systems, dance and poetry [10], though is particularly popular in computer music, combining algorithmic composition with improvisation [11]. Usually, projecting of the computer screen will be used to share the processing of code writing to the audience, shown as Fig.1. This visualisation procedure may also be improved by some graphical software (e.g., Processing) to make a more vivid graphic. Beside performance, live coding techniques can also be employed in other fields, for example, in producing audio/visual work for interactive art installations. or sound for film. Also, is it also quite popular to write the code by a group and the interconnection through a network makes possible to realize this. 

In programming-related lectures and conference presentations, Live coding is also an increasingly prevalent technique and has been described as a "best practice" for computer science lectures by Mark Guzdial. 

Multi-user programming and shared memory 

In the context of group music-making multi-user programming has developed a lot, through the long development of the Republic system developed and employed by members of the network band PowerBooks Unplugged. Republic is built into the Super Collider language, and allows participants to collaboratively spontaneously write live code that is distributed across the network of computers. 

BEER – An Ensemble Interested in Live Coding 

Birmingham Ensemble for Electroacoustic Research, or BEER for short, was founded by Scott Wilson in 2011 as a research project within the Music Department. Its aim is to explore aspects of realtime electroacoustic music making. Particular interests include networked music performance and live coding (programming music in real time using algorithms that can be altered while they are running). In keeping with post-free jazz developments in improvisation (e.g. Zorn, Braxton), we create structures in software that impose limitations and formal articulations on the musical flow (with networked software systems serving as intervention mechanism / arbiter / structural provocateur par excellence). Musical influences run the gamut from Xenakis to Journey [12]. 

In a recent concert at Birmingham, four members of BEER generated music via using live doing and improvising on structures imposed by the network computer system. This project is particularly on using data from Cern and hadron collider from the CMS project ­ and they were using the data for sonification and parameters for synthesis processes (Scott Wilson). The quantity of data is so big too handle, luckily, BEER has created a specific function that is shared amongst the members although everyone is playing by himself without a centralised master who dictate how things should be played or changed. At the same time, each member of BEER changes how things 

are played independently (Luca Danieli). Scott Wilson, the founder of BEER also thought that it is peculiar in a sense that it has a large range. Which is normal not a problem as they can just scale it. But from a musical perspective, it is interesting because sometimes the outliers will give an extremely high note – as an outlier. From a musical perspective it is interesting in how to make these outlier sounds musical and meaningful. 

Conclusion 

The music created by these two methods may sound a little strange and unnatural, but Stochastic music and live coding do play two important roles. One opened the door of generating music stochastically and the other provides a way of making music synergistically and electronically during the long-term development of composition, 

References and Notes

1. Stochastic Music. <https://rateyourmusic.com/genre/Stochastic+Music/> 

2. Iannis Xenakis. (2016, March 30). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:33, April 1, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iannis_Xenakis 

3. Di Scipio, Agostino. "Formalization and Intuition in Analogique A et B." Definitive Proceedings of the International Symposium Iannis Xenakis (Athens, May 2005). 2005. 

4. Formalized Music. (2015, November 27). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:31, April 1, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalized_Music 

5. James Tenney. (2016, February 1). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:40, April 1, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tenney 

6. Francisco Guerrero Marín. (2015, September 5). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:42, April 1, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Guerrero_Mar%C3%ADn 

7. Winston Yeung. <http://www.yeungtw.com/#!about/pka7g>

8. Collins, N., McLean, A., Rohrhuber, J. & Ward, A. (2003), "Live Coding in 

Laptop Performance", Organised Sound 8(3): 321–30. 

9. Wang G. & Cook P. (2004) "On-the-fly Programming: Using Code as an Expressive Musical Instrument", In Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) (New York: NIME, 2004). 

10. Magnusson, T. (2013). The Threnoscope. A Musical Work for Live Coding Performance. In Live 2013. First International Workshop on Live Programming. 

11. Collins, N. (2003) "Generative Music and Laptop Performance", Contemporary Music Review 22(4):67–79. 

12. BEER - Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre <http://www.beast.bham.ac.uk/offspring/beer/>