So I’ve been thinking about Steven Johnsons encounter with the machines a lot recently. I’ve also been listening to a whole of IDM recent (thanks last.fm!). And then it dawned on me…

Electronic music musicians have been working with and have been inspired by machines for a long time already. Two artists that come to mind are Richard Devine and Autechre.

Lately Devine has been experimenting with composing music using algorithmic-based sequencers. “I was doing quite a bit of this with MAX/MSP, but soon discovered other interesting avenues,” says Devine. “The first was a neat little app called Symbolic Composer.” Symbolic Composer is a complete music language that covers all aspects of music composition.

Sound on Sound illustrates the point well:

Perhaps the most challenging and potentially controversial aspect of Autechre’s music is their use of generative sequences. Confield contains more of these than their other works, though they also feature on their latest release, Draft 7:30. Insofar as these sequences involve drum machine sounds they are sometimes referred to as ‘random beats’. The adjective clearly sits uneasily with Booth, who is at pains to point out that the beats are far from random.

“There’s a lot of maths and generated beats on Confield, but we never considered that album very difficult,” asserts Booth. “It’s like pop music compared to some of the stuff we had considered putting out! And even when the beats sound like they are moving around in time and space, they’re not random. They’re based on sets of rules and we have a good handle on them.

Steven Johnson used an advanced search tool to find make connections to information that he would not have on his own and Richard Devine and Autechre use advanced audio manipulation tools to create music that they would / could not have created on their own.

I suppose the difference here is that Autechre and co. are creating complete finished products. Johnson’s relationship with his tools is more an ongoing symbiotic relationship of sorts. Last.fm possibly comes close to that.

So what happens when we see this idea spreading to other fields? Bots set out to achive this goal years ago but have, for the most part failed. I rate they’ll be making a reapearance soon…