A 3.5 minute excerpt of the fully generative, never repeating music composition system for Universal Everything's V&A Forever installation in the John Madejski garden of the Victoria & Albert Museum London (Nov 2008 - Feb 2009).

The music was composed in realtime (in Java/OpenAL) using a custom developed generative system which strategically picked instruments from a library of approx. 250 single-note base samples, designed by Simon Pyke (@freefarm). These samples are then dynamically arranged into polyrhythms, chords, melodies of varying densities & intensities. All of these rhythms, chord progressions, the melodic phrases themselves, repetitions, transpositions, key & tempo changes are entirely generative & evolving, using a variety of techniques. E.g. cellular automata are used to generate somewhat ordered partial melodies, then are randomly mutated to produce key changes, variations or entirely new phrases over time. The overall tempo of the composition was varied between ~65 - 130 bmp via layered (additive) sine waves, similar to the concept of a biorhythm and creating a larger soft arc/transition to a more up-beat character towards the end of the installation (after 2+ months).

I developed a custom GUI tool to allow Simon and me to define the macro configuration of the composition system, assign individual metadata for each of the 250 instruments/samples (e.g. pitch/octave ranges, min/max tempos, tags, usage probabilities at certain times, group associations, exclusions). It took ~5 months of daily fine tuning and listening to hundreds of hours of generated outputs to create this composition system. Yet, once the installation was live, an entirely new & different (within parameters) composition resulted and so put us on equal footing with any other visitor/listener.

Project documentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ988B5vlyo

Algorithm & generative music composition system: Karsten Schmidt. Sound design: Simon Pyke. Creative direction: Matt Pyke