Learn How Generative Music Works With This Interactive Website

Teropa references and explains the work of composers like Brian Eno, Terry Riley and John Cage.

Have you ever wanted to take a deeper dive into the world of generative music, like Laurie Spiegel’s “Music Mouse” or Brian Eno’s “Reflection”? This awesome interactive website called Teropa explains how these compositions work.

As the author of the site explains, the term “generative music” describes a sound that is ever-changing: it’s different each time you listen to it. Terry Riley’s infamous “In C”, for example, provides a blueprint for an indefinite number of musicians to play a series of melodic fragments at once, so no two performances of the piece will ever be the same. The website even lets you click around a graphical rendering of the composition to experiment with for yourself.

“The thing about music like this is that they are actually of almost infinite length. They simply don’t reconfigure the same way again. This is music for free in a sense. The considerations that are important, then, become questions of how it works and most important of all, what you feed into it,” Brian Eno said of generative systems. Read up on this fascinating musical form by visiting the website here.

Read more: Brian Eno talks about his new ambient album that lasts forever