Generative App From Brian Eno Makes Music That Thinks For Itself

Among the many different formats that have flourished on the app platform, is experimental music apps—like Biophilia. If you peruse the app store looking for such things you’ll find plenty to keep you entertained. Maybe it’s the ease with which you can have a quick play with them while waiting for the bus or go more indepth if you’re sitting at home, but they’re perfectly suited to the flexibility of mobile computing.

The latest one in this vein was released yesterday and is called Scape. It’s from a little known musician called Brian Eno and software designer Peter Chilvers, who both previously collaborated on the app Bloom. Their new app is a generative music app where you can play around with 15 different musical “scapes,” which the listing says “offers users deep access to its musical elements.” The app uses some of the methods that Eno and Chilvers have used over their careers while also exploring the concept of music being made by machines, music that reacts to itself in an intelligent way to create new sounds.

That’s not to say it’s going to become sentient and take over your iPad, but that the music will evolve itself along with your input.

From the listing:

Can machines create original music? Scape is our answer to that question: it employs some of the sounds, processes and compositional rules that we have been using for many years and applies them in fresh combinations, to create new music. Scape makes music that thinks for itself.

@stewart23rd