The Future of Generative Music
Why the world is finally ready for endless music systems
I’ve been having a lot of fun making generative music in the browser during the last year. With the Web Audio API supported in all of the browsers that actually matter, I believe we’re currently at the cusp of unprecedented potential for generative music systems.
Brian Eno was releasing generative music systems as early as 1996 on floppy disks. With the advent of the iPhone, he and Peter Chilvers began releasing many more generative music systems for smartphones and tablets. At the same time, increases in internet speeds led to the emergence of digital downloads and streaming services. Today, music services like Spotify are so ubiquitous that computers and smartphones have become the primary devices used to consume music. This means the devices we use to listen to music are also capable of generating music, live, in real time.
During this convergence of musical consumption and production capabilities, web applications proved themselves to be the easiest way for people to use software. This was clearly inevitable when one compares the convenience of navigating to a URL to the excise required to install native applications. Sure, installing apps on your smartphone is easy, and doing the same on your desktop can be easy, but neither competes with the…
