WIND AND TORTOISE SHELL: MUSINGS ON GENERATIVE MUSIC

Spartacus: I want to know things… Everything: why a star falls and a bird doesn’t? Where the sun goes at night? Why the moon changes shape? I want to know where the wind comes from.

Varinia: The wind begins in a cave, far to the north. A young god sleeps in that cave, he dreams of a girl and he sighs, and the night wind stirs with his breath.

GENERATIVE ART/MUSIC

Art in which non-human systems, procedures, chance, etc. determine aspects of the work that would typically necessitate an artist’s discernment. Works in which an artist purposely reliquinshes a degree of direct control.

The emphasis of this article is on the anthropomorphization of such non-human actors, or more precisely, the projection of a soul, consciousness, or psychological landscape onto autonomous systems used to create art, not necessarily a human soul, but a distinct and expressive other. The Ghost in the shell.

In the opening quote, the wind is expressed as the sigh of a young god dreaming of love. Its naive in scientific terms, but to evaluate it in scientific terms is to miss the point.

The wind may be one of our earliest collaborators when it comes to generative music. The ancient Chinese, Ethiopians, Greeks, Indians, Indonesians, and Melanesians are thought to have made, as the Greeks put it, Aeolian Harps, stringed instruments strung by Aeolus ruler of the winds. I’d like to emphasize the poetic title of the instrument. Unlike wind chimes, the Aeolian harp personifies the wind as Aeolus, a character who knows what it means to be born and to feel. While the Aeolian harp forgoes a human harpist, it allows for the subjectivity of the wind. Is the wind impersonal? Is Aeolus?

GAZE UPWARD AND DISCERN THE WRITTING IN THE SKY. BOW YOUR HEAD AND DISCERN THE LOGIC OF THE EARTH

While the history of generative music is fascinating, from wind-instruments to dice games, experiments with feedback and radios, and now large language models, I’d like to take a broader, and perhaps more oblique stroke, and look at the Chinese tradition of Gongshi. 1,000 years before Duchamp’s fountain, the Chinese developed an aesthetic of the found object known as Gongshi. Crafted by water, waves, weather, sand, and millennia, Gongshi were peculiarly twisted stones collected by scholars and artists for their various interesting formal qualities: subtleties of color, asymmetry, markings, surface, and even the musical sounds they produce when tapped. The stones were admired as nature’s expression of itself, fractal self-portraits.

Stones were found, collected, sometimes altered, and put on display where they were thought to provide a sort of wisdom to the viewer. The role of humans in Gongshi is relatively slight. Humans offer the stones recognition and, at times, collaboration in the form of subtle sculptural interventions indistinct from the rock’s natural form.

Before continuing I’d first like to acknowledge my limited knowledge of Chinese culture. Mindful of orientalism, my goal is to inspire inquiry, not mischaracterization.

Gongshi is just one example in ancient China where wisdom is placed on the signs or phenomena emergent in nature. What nature tells us—and it has much to say—is neither happenstance nor mere beauty. If such a thing exist.

Nature is not just a source of inspiration, but in some cases, prophetic knowledge. This view of nature is evident in the practice of oracle bones, where diviners would interpret the cracks formed by heat on animal bones, typically turtle shells or cow bones, to gain insights into the future or seek guidance on important decisions. Similarly, the I Ching, or Book of Changes, is an ancient divination text that uses patterns of broken and unbroken lines (hexagrams) derived from tossing yarrow stalks. It provides philosophical and ethical guidance based on the natural order and the interplay of opposing forces. The I-ching may be the most famous implementation of chance, outside of gambling

Why anyone would place prophetic significance on cracks in a turtle, or the arrangement of yarrow stalks may be difficult to reconcile with our contemporary perspective, illuminated by science and rationalism. I once read a story about a man visiting a shaman. Everyday the shaman laid out a plate of food on a shrine for their ancestors, and everyday the food disappeared. The man, being curious and a skeptic, watched the plate of food to see where it went. He saw a procession of ants carry the food away, and ran to the shaman proclaiming, “Its the ants! The ants take the food” to which the shaman replied “yes, I told you it goes to our ancestors”

It might be tempting to reduce this dichotomy between a more rational/material way of thinking and a more mystical/metaphysical to a difference in Western and Eastern thinking, or to condemn our ancestors as ignorant for believing in such superstitious practices, but surely the issue is more nuanced. Even in Christianity and Judaism today there is often little room for the concept of chance. Casting of lots is mentioned 47 times in the Hebrew Bible, where the world is viewed as following the will of God, as stated in Proverbs 16:33: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” This viewpoint, emphasizing divine providence over randomness, is shared by many Americans even today. God works in mysterious ways.

CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

Divination techniques may seem a far cry from generative music, but what I’ve hoped to make clear, is that since prehistory we have conversed with the unknown, betraying certainty for the call that can arise from darkness. Allowing natural processes to unfold we have seeked wisdom, guidance, and perhaps most importantly, meaning from the world’s inherent order or disorder, dependt on your worldview. It’s not the same meaning that arises from science and rational thought, but rather a meaning of a different order, the sort of meaning that runs parallel to life, that courses through life, rather than sitting above it.

To face the unknown is a condition of life. Generative art offers a way to engage with this condition, to come to terms with it through a practice.

I think of generative music as a collaboration—a means to escape one’s self, one’s control,one's ego, preconceived notions, one’s one. When you collaborate with another person you open the work to the mystery of another’s mind. When you collaborate with the unknown you open the work to the mystery of life. As a composition unfolds there’s the enchanting possibility of what could happen. In special moments, perhaps when the light is low–it can feel like the music is alive, as though it’s a conduit, channeling something, anything. To make generative music is to embark into the cloud of unknowing, to sit down with the ineffable.