algorithmic music

A Tiny Desk concert in which pianist Dan Tepfer plays with a Disklavier player piano driven by a program he wrote that responds to his playing. He performs four pieces from his Natural Machines project.

Viznut's third bytebeat video presents music generated by very short C programs and JavaScript expressions. It links to online tools and deeper analysis of one-line music.

Viznut demonstrates bytebeat, experimental music generated by extremely short C programs. It is the first of a series of videos on the technique.

Planets is a track from the audiovisual album Oscilloscope Music, in which the audio signal drives an analog oscilloscope directly. The left channel sets horizontal deflection and the right sets vertical, so the sound draws vector graphics.

The official music video for Autechre's 'Gantz Graf', a dense, glitchy electronic track paired with abstract animated 3D visuals reportedly made by hand in 2002.

A short clip of a track from Emily Howell, a computer program by David Cope that composes classical-style music, performed by human players. It is a sample of algorithmic composition.

Sam Aaron, creator of Sonic Pi, gives a demo-heavy GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on live coding music. He covers the history of Sonic Pi, how it evolved, and what it can do for education and professional musicians.

'Pipe Dream' is the best-known piece from the first Animusic DVD, a computer-animated music video in which fantastical machines play music. The animation is driven by MIDI data.

A long live-coded DJ set in which Sam Aaron creates all the music in real time by writing code in his Sonic Pi system. It demonstrates algorithmic electronic music performance.

Adam Neely examines Phil Ewell's paper arguing Western music theory is framed by a white racial perspective. He covers North Indian theory, alternative frameworks, Schenker and responses to the paper.

Tantacrul's 76-minute deep dive into the history of western music notation and the many proposed replacements, such as piano rolls, colored notes and the jubilate. He explains why none have displaced the current system.

Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.

A full performance of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians by eighth blackbird with Third Coast Percussion and others, recorded in Chicago in 2011. It is an hour-long minimalist piece built on phasing and repeating patterns.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

Andrew Huang teaches the basics of music theory in about half an hour, covering intervals, chords and patterns. He stresses understanding how music works over memorizing terminology.

The first part of a four-part Channel 4 (UK) documentary series presented by Howard Goodall, this episode covers melody and why tunes affect us so deeply. It explains how melody works in Western music with historical background and music theory.

Tantacrul analyzes how stock music in reality TV uses blunt, repeated tropes to manipulate viewers, comparing it to nature documentaries. He ties it to ideas of reification and cultural homogenization.

Composer Tantacrul explores how corporatism produces soulless background music, and how some companies use such music in propaganda-style campaigns. He composes several corporate styles to show their tropes, with some music theory along the way.

Musician Benn Jordan uses AI to detect AI-generated music and digs into music industry data, including streaming payouts and sample library copyright problems. He covers ways to tell whether a track is human-made.

Adam Neely analyzes vaporwave through music theory, timbre and nostalgia, and includes a parody track made for the video. He also touches on the phenomenology of music.

A 1991 Amiga tracker module, 'Space Debris' by Captain (Markus Kaarlonen), uploaded as a video of the music. It is a well-known piece of demoscene-era computer music.

The official music video for The Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar, directed by Michel Gondry. Visuals of a passing landscape are synced to elements of the music.

A profane video review in the Your Product Sucks series that picks apart the Apple Music app on macOS Catalina and its usability problems.

The official music video for Blues Traveler's song Hook, remastered in HD. The song is known for using the melody of Pachelbel's Canon while its lyrics comment on how hooks work.

Chris Ford builds up from a single sine wave through layered abstractions to a Bach canon, using Clojure and the Overtone audio environment. The talk shows music theory as a natural fit for functional programming.

Andrew Sorensen's OSCON 2014 keynote in which he live-codes generative music on stage using his Impromptu environment while narrating his computational and musical choices. It imagines concert programmers as a performing art.

Sam Aaron live codes an ambient electronic set using Sonic Pi, the music programming environment he created. The performance shows code driving music in real time.

Bassist Victor Wooten argues that music should be learned the way children learn their first language: by immersion and play, without early correction or rigid academic instruction. He draws on how babies pick up speech from the people around them.

Adam Neely's Ableton Loop 2017 talk links rhythm, pitch and synaesthesia. He shows that polyrhythms sped up become chords, so tempo and pitch are related by ratios.

A short Frank Zappa interview clip on the decline of the music business, contrasting old cigar-chomping executives with younger industry people.

The official music video for They Might Be Giants' "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" from the 1990 album Flood.

The official music video for Insane Clown Posse's song Miracles, from the album Bang Pow Boom.

Lawyer and musician Damien Riehl argues that music is math with a finite number of melodies, and describes how he and programmer Noah Rubin generated every possible melody and released them under CC0 to avoid accidental infringement claims.

Vsauce asks whether music will ever run out of new melodies. It counts the possible note combinations and discusses how common chord progressions and remixing affect originality.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

K Lars Lohn's PyCon 2016 keynote weaves together music theory, programming, biking road trips and fractals. It is a personal, wide-ranging talk rather than a Python how-to.

The music video for Aphex Twin's T69 Collapse, directed by Weirdcore, with heavy strobing and glitchy audiovisual imagery. It is a track from the Collapse EP.

The official music video for A$AP Mob's Yamborghini High featuring Juicy J, known for heavy datamoshing and glitch effects with hue shifting.

Andrew Huang explains the harmonic series, which he calls the foundation of almost all music. He builds the idea up step by step, with demonstrations of overtones and how harmonies derive from them.

Adam Neely interviews Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin about their project to generate and copyright every possible melody as MIDI. The video explains their reasoning and how it bears on music copyright lawsuits.