Stochastic Microtonal Techno Generator
TLDR: I made randomly assembling aleotoric microtonal music! Here’s an example.
So I’m pretty interested in “weird music” - like I actually enjoy 12 tone, atonal, noise music, ambient tunes, silence, etc etc. However, as someone who is also interested in composing, I find that my tragically hyper-rational brain struggles to actually output music as weird and cool as I’d like it to be. And while I do think that pure random music Ala John Cage is cool too, I was primarily drawn to the idea of using randomness not as the primary building block of a track, but rather as a tool for injecting the weirdness I seek but have a trouble actually composing by hand. Here is a silly meme that illustrates how I feel about aleatoric elements in my own compositions:
A second motivation while all this was going on is my friend recently told me the story of how she spent all night in a crazy basement techno club in NYC. I thought that was pretty cool as a EDM fan and sometime producer myself so I came up with the idea of making some “weird” EDM using aleatoric elements that could hopefully channel the energy and maybe with some honing be used in some other distant techno basement club in the future.
My program operates somewhere in-between the Music of the Changes-esque “roll dice and that’s totally what happens” and the Mozart Dice Game “combining pre-composed elements in some random fashion” paradigms. I do have some knowledge of techno from listening and producing and before so I began by finding and creating some synths and precomposing some figures, drum fills, and other melodic and percussive elements. Next up is randomly assembling these elements. Again, using my preexisting techno knowledge I came up with the following building-block sections for my techno track: Intro, Build-up/Drop, and Chorus.
Each section has some variable amount of elements that play during the parts. For example, the build-up is the only section that uses the riser synth I wrote and has unique drop percussion elements.
Try it here! https://github.com/antchristou/Stochastic-Microtonal-Techno-