Generative Music

Generative music, a term coined and popularized by legendary musician Brian Eno, is a type of music characterized as being always different, always changing, and produced by a system.  There are four major perspectives on generative music: linguistic/structural (music generated from analytic theories that become structurally coherent), interactive/behavioral (music created by a system that has no inputs and cannot be transformed), creative/procedural (music created by processes that were designed/initiated by the composer), and biological/emergent (music that cannot be replicated, such as from wind chimes).  There is a wide range of software used to make generative music; one such program, the SSEYO Koan Pro, was used by Brian Eno to create his hybrid album Generative Music 1.

Brian Eno is an English musician, record producer, composer, singer, visual artist, and one of the pioneers of the ambient music scene.  Between 1980 and 1981, he collaborated with David Byrne on the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.  While living in the States, Eno collected samples of radio broadcasts and samples of recordings from all over the world and transposed them over music influenced by African and Middle Eastern rhythms.  What was groundbreaking about the album was its extensive use of sampling and for connecting the musical styles of electronic, ambience, and Third World countries.  It is still considered by many critics to be the high point of both artists' careers.