Seeded Tunes – An Introduction

For quite a while now I’ve been chipping away at a project that combines music, art, my fascination with music family trees, generative processes, and laziness.

The idea – Seeded Tunes – is to use a random number generator to create music. But it’s a lot more complex, and in some ways a lot simpler, than that.

There are many tools and projects where people are using computers to create art, music, literature, you name it, with random elements. There might be a Markov Chain driving the creation of a written article, or a semi-AI using a corpus of existing creations to generate something similar but completely original. My project is not like that, but has parallels.

In a nutshell, you give my program a number (the “seed”), and it will generate an entire “scene” of music, with multiple labels, each with multiple named artists, each with multiple named albums, each with album artwork and multiple named tracks, each with generated tunes and drum patterns. It will also create a “Rock Family Tree” broadly in the style of Pete Frame’s fascinating work, which I’ve talked about before.

There are many aspects to this, and I’ll describe them in detail over the next few posts. It’s all been rattling around in my head for too long, and people have taken an interest, so here’s where to get in the know.

In the next post, I’ll talk about the WHY…