The Rules Of Music

Brian Eno teams up with Will Wright to demonstrate how complex music and visuals can be constructed from a few very simple rules. There are of course many ways to create music, but it’s often the case that having too many options is actually detrimental to creativity…

The Art Of The Generative

Not content with having pioneered the genre of ambient music, Eno has since delved deep into the concepts of generative music – that is, music which does not have a traditional structure and arrangement, but which is actually generated on the fly by an algorithm that follows a set of instructions.

The artist in this case is responsible for providing certain seed parameters, the starting point from which the entire musical composition is then derived. However, as illustrated in the video below featuring Eno and Will Wright (creator of the Sims series of computer games), even a very simple set of rules can lead to surprisingly complex output results…