The basic idea I got from the reading was that currently composed-music is too boring and predictable, and she develops this idea of ‘random corruption’ to make music more interesting and makes it a point to differentiate it from ‘random generation’. I think that’s fair enough. As I was reading her article, I was about to bring out my pitchfork as I didn’t believe in random generation for music, as I believe that as expressive as music is, there are rules and certain guidelines you can play by to make music more interesting. E.g in piano composition, a common trick to make a LH chord + RH melody sound more interesting is to arpeggiate the LH chord. Does that make it predictable? Sure, maybe, but it’s just one of the ways of approaching music composition and there are many other ways of doing it, but it has sounded nice for hundreds of years and it will be difficult for randomly generated notes to approach the history and impact of this approach.

However that wasn’t the point she was making so I was thankful and put my pitchfork down. Random corruption is a much more palatable idea to me, and when Prof Aaron demonstrated the randomly dropped notes in class last Thursday I understood that there are some uses to it. However, this still relies on an composed piece, with random corruption removing information from the composition, and not adding entropy/random information to it ( random generation ). A composed piece is order brought together by a person from the chaos of the notes in the world. Removing some information from this order will still sound nice. Adding completely random noise to it will not. That is an important distinguishing feature between the two.

After writing this critique, I went on to listen to Laurie Spiegel’s album — The Expanding Universe (1980) and I liked it! It sounded rather compositional with possibly a few hints of randomly dropped notes ( or at least that’s what I thought ). It was released before this article was written, so I’m not sure if she was already inspired by this idea of this information theory model or if it was still in the works. I listened to her newer album after, Obsolete Systems (2001), and it definitely felt more ‘random generation’ and I liked it less because of that.