From the beginning I envisioned Whole-Play presenting two simultaneous and complementary traits: organicity and direction.

The problem of organicity and direction

Organicity: one of the frequent issues I find with computer generated music is the lack of an organic response, compared to how music made by humans would be. Complexity and subtlety are not generally a problem, but organicity is harder to achieve. Computer responses are often rigid in nature, and even when they can change over time they often do it separate from their context, either through randomness or pre-defined mechanisms. I want the music generated by Whole-Play to feel organic (both sound and composition), to respond to its context in a sensitive and, well, organic way.

Direction: I also don't feel interested in generating music that doesn't have a direction. Whole-Play needs to have an intention, and work towards that, not simply present change in a random or meaningless way.

Exploring indicators

I don't have answers for this (good!), but one of the things I'm trying is what I call indicators. It's a simple idea, but I think it will contribute towards achieving the above two objectives. An indicator is simply a number, 0 to 1, that represents a certain quality of the music. Right now I'm trying three indicators:

• Intensity: is the music very still, or is is there lots of activity?
• Density: is the music very spacious, or very compressed/thick?
• Anarchy: is the music playing 'nice', or is it rather provoking?

At any given moment in the piece, each indicator will have a certain value. But how does this work?

The Virtual Composer is the one who decides how each indicator changes over time. It might set them suddenly to a new value (i.e. "let's make the intensity jump from 0.2 to 0.8 now!"), or gradually change them over a period of time. This addresses the problem of direction.

The resulting effect of these indicator changes will be multiple. Many elements of the music can respond to each indicator. For instance, the amount of distorsion in the guitar might be connected to the intensity, and its reverb to the density, the paning of the whole mix might depend on density, the dissonance in counterpoint on anarchy, the choice of harmony on intensity, and so on. This tackles the organicity aspect.

So as the indicators change their values, based on the direction of the Composer, many aspects of the composition will change in an organic way.

I still face two issues:

• How will the Composer make its decisions? How can they be interesting? Otherwise there's the risk of losing the direction battle, and getting a result that might as well be random or pre-defined.
• What will be the effects of each indicator, specifically? This I suspect will involve a fair bit of exploration and fine-tuning. If this is not done well, I might not achieve the organicity in the response that I imagine.

This is not the only strategy I'm thinking of to provide direction and organicity, it will combine with other parts of Whole-Play (which should in itself enhance the organic aspect). Let's see how this unfolds! I think I'll have a first version of this soon, I'll post a sample as soon as it's working.