Brian Eno and generative music (which anticipated the AI)
A new album, the first soloist in three years for Brian Eno: is titled “Aurum” and was published surprisingly on Friday 21 exclusively on Apple Music. It contains 11 compositions of ambient music for a total of 70 minutes, in space audio – was designed specifically for this sound format. In fact, the album was born from a collaboration with the platform: from December Eno leads a program on Apple Music Radio dedicated to “Dark music, calm, difficult to pitch” and in each episode it presented a new track. All these songs, published as individuals in recent weeks, have then merged into “Aurum”.
Together with the publication, Eno appeared in a video shot in his study with Zane Lowe, face and main voice of Apple Music Radio, in which he told his creative process.
With interesting ideas on what defines the “real problem” of the relationship between artificial intelligence and music.
Brian Eno’s generative music
In the video, Eno does not speak directly of the album, but shows its musical archive, which contains about 10,550 tracks (“Over 44 days of music”) and a software that allows it to generate unique compositions by combining these songs unpredictable: “As soon as I click, a new music piece will be created, which will be a random combination among my almost 11,000 songs.
It is a technique that seems to replicate some “creative” mechanisms of artificial intelligence: the composition starting from automated patterns within a software. Eno, however, has been working on these forms together with Peter Chilvers for almost twenty years: only a few weeks ago, the single “Bloom: Living World” was released, made with music automatically generated through Blooman iPhone application initially published in 2008. In the app the user provides some inputs on the touch screen: the rest is automatically processed, combining relaxing sounds and pastel -colored animations to create potentially infinite ambient music because it automatically generated starting from these inputs.
“It is not said ‘L Work With Music’,” I Play Music ‘is said.
And it’s true: I think every creative job is a sort of game. The game is a way to explore things. “
The problem with artificial intelligence
Did Eno’s work with generative music anticipated artificial intelligence in the sound field? In the conversation with Lowe, Eno faces the topic with an interesting reasoning, both from a political and creative point of view. According to him, the problem of AI is the control and lack of diversity: “The biggest problem for me of the Ai is not the Ai in itself, but the fact that it is always controlled by the same few people. Social media have not been created to make people happier, but to maximize involvement, because involvement translates into profit.”
For Eno, technology should not be used to replicate pre -existing patterns, but to generate new unexpected possibilities: “As for the AI in itself, I have always been happy to use new technologies and see what can be done, with the possibility and no one else had thought, and what things can be done beyond the purposes for which they had been designed.
“An example is the distortion in music:” In a certain sense, it is the sound of pop music. Many of the things we find exciting in the use of equipment derive from small malfunctions. “
For Eno, generative art is not a simple automatic mechanism that creates replicas, but a system that requires care in the selection of sound sources and rules that govern the creative process, allowing the creation of unexpected possibilities: “The system does nothing interesting if it does not have interesting inputs, carefully selected, and this requires a lot of work. Even the filtering phase is a demanding job.”
Brian Eno’s production
Eno, in recent years, has been anything but stopped in the music field.
His latest album alone before “Aurum” is “Foreverandevernomore” of 2022, a work of songs then published in the instrumental remix version a few months later. In 2023 he released “Secret Life”, a collaborative album with Fred Again., Then the soundtrack of the documentary “Eno” (2024) and, in recent months, has recovered material from its boundless archive with projects such as “77 Million Paintings” and, precisely, “Bloom: Living World”, available in a version of an hour and a “Small World” version. Recently, Eno has also published the book “What Art Does”, a reflection on the mechanisms of creativity, illustrated by Bette A.
Although you do not speak directly of “Aurum” in the interview with Zane Lowe, it can be assumed that it was composed with the generative method, the evolution of her idea of ambient music, defined now 50 years ago. That is, a music that can be listened to absently, like a sound upholstery, or feel carefully, revealing unique ideas and sounds. “Aurum” is perhaps not a revolutionary album like some of its previous productions, but confirms that Eno remains one of the most interesting creative figures around.
