http://flavorwire.com/391693/65-immortal-brian-eno-quotes-for-his-65th-birthday/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=flavorwire&utm_campaign=standard-post
and here is the quotes related to generative music:
“Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish. I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing.” [via]
“With a generative piece you set a machine going and it makes itself, and you as the composer are also the listener. The act of listening is the act of composing. When you’re hearing these complicated shifting patterns going on, it’s the aural equivalent of Moire illusions, and that very much impressed me. What also impressed me was how different the composer’s role is from the old romantic idea that the composer pours out these wonderful things to the passive you, the listener — with art as a kind of tube that the artist shouts down to the more or less thick listener at the end.” [via]
“Some very basic forms of generative music have existed for a long time, but as marginal curiosities. Wind chimes are an example, but the only compositional control you have over the music they produce is in the original choice of notes that the chimes will sound. Recently, however, out of the union of synthesizers and computers, some much finer tools have evolved… The works I have made with [these tools] symbolize to me the beginning of a new era of music… I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: ‘You mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?’” [via]
“I reject the results of chance if they don’t excite me sensually – whereas [like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and John Cage] were rather more doctrinaire about it. Their feeling was that they ‘believed’ in chance as though it had a sort of mystical dimension. I don’t. I think chance is what you use when you can’t think of a better basis on which to make a decision, or when you want to take yourself into territory that you haven’t been before.” [via]
And all this to get you inspired to use Da SunVox to Self generate your own...