Rand

Open the Artwork

Joe Gilmore & Tom Betts
Joe Gilmore is a graphic designer and digital sound artist. He has released his music on various international record labels including 12k [USA], Line [USA], Alku [Spain], Fallt [Ireland] and Melange [Japan]. He has been working in the field of sound art for over 10 years and has exhibited audio installations in the UK, Sonar in Spain, Germany and the U.S. His current audio projects include Vend - which explores the subtleties of microscopic digital minimalism, and Plank - a solo project exploring algorithmic computer music composition. He has performed at various UK festivals including Lovebytes, Ultrasound, Evolution, National Revue of Live Arts and Leeds International Film Festival.

Tom Betts is an artist, programmer and musician. He is one of the most prolific and versatile artists practising in the field of digital and interactive media. His creative output represents an impressive and significant body of work, including pieces such as QQQ : a networked game mod, bitmapsequencer : a visual synthesis tool and Webtracer : a 3D website visualizer. Recent activities also include an electronic score for contemporary dance, audio to visual interfaces and tools using generative programming techniques, a seven track EP of his generative electronic music, and a publishing deal with EMI for his experimental pop band, Weevil.

rand()%

Development Date: 2003
Tips: Download the playlist file (http://62.169.138.240:8000/listen.pls) and open it in your mp3 stream player (eg. Mac: iTunes, Windows: Winamp).

Open the Artwork

rand()% is a departure from many of the other works presented in Dots & Lines. While most of the pieces in the exhibition use imagery to challenge our conception of what a score can be, rand()% offers a powerful, yet invisible, notion of a score. rand()% is an automated net.radio station streaming generative music. The generative sound works on rand()% are created by audio artists, musicians and software programmers, and the name is taken from the code of the computer language C++. All musical content is generated by a computer, in real-time, and streamed out over the world wide web. Generative music is concerned with works that are totally process based. A composer traditionally creates music in the form of a piece of recorded work or written score. Music from this standpoint is a closed system, a unique piece of work that can be learned or listened to again and again. Generative music differs from this in that it is constructed in real time from a set of rules specified by the composer and enacted by the computer. Many generative works contain rules, which allow for randomness and chance - meaning that the music is endless and never repeats itself. The rules by which generative music unfolds are expressed using permutations, percentages and random numbers.

Within generative music, the score, if it could be said to exist at all, is the language, or code, which is used to programme the computer. This code looks entirely different to what we traditionally think of as musical notation, and yet like a conventional music score that instructs musicians to play certain notes in certain ways, computer code consists of instructions and rules which instruct the computer to undertake specific tasks or play certain notes.