This paper explores current and hypothetical implementations of machine learning toward the creation and marketing of cultural commodities, focusing on music in popular and experimental forms. Building on Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of the culture industry, this article considers the role of machine learning and artificial intelligence as a force for stylistic standardization and further consolidation of economic power in music and art.
This article examines the relationship between orchestration and microtonality in the music of Marc Sabat through a score-based analysis of two recent works, Asking Ocean (2016), for string quartet and large ensemble, and The Luminiferous Aether (2018), for large orchestra. Excerpts from these two compositions are discussed to highlight the challenges of composing for orchestral forces in a musical style that demands a high degree of microtonal pitch precision. Through retuning, alteration, and a sensitivity to the construction, techniques and performance practices of orchestral instruments, Sabat has developed a unique manner of orchestrating that is at once timbrally rich and uncompromising in pitch precision. After a brief introduction to the extended just intonation framework that Sabat employs, his concepts of ‘fixed microtonal pitches’ and ‘tuneable intervals’ are discussed and connected to orchestration in his scores. Drawing upon this analysis, connections are made between the microtonal system with orchestration and musical aesthetics broadly.
This article investigates the musical language of Brian Cherney, applying the idea of musical topics as a strategy for analyzing the extramusical content of his music. The idea of musical topics, traditionally applied to works from the classical era, is expanded with a collection of topics that are specific to Cherney’s work. Focusing on a set of chamber pieces from throughout Cherney’s compositional output beginning in the 1960s, this article focuses particularly on the topic of “ascending music,” tracing its musical and expressive meaning through these chamber works. The article concludes with a topic-based analysis ofGan Eden,a 1983 piece for violin and piano, providing an example of how topics coexist and interact within a single composition.
This article explores concepts of compositional meaning that arise from cocreative composing with music-generation software. Drawing from an analysis of the 2017 electroacoustic composition Virtutes Occultae, the composer discusses the implications of computer-generated music for the role of the composer. After an overview of how the music-generation software he developed contributed to the creation of Virtutes Occultae, the composer makes comparisons between his process and the use of generative commercial music software to create music, in order to draw distinctions between creating computer-generated music to extend aesthetic sensibilities and creating computer-generated music that iterates based on established commercial styles. Finally, the composer proposes future paths for further investigation involving the development of new musical styles through computer-generated music and reactive computer improvisation.
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