The infinite from the ephemeral: Jean-Michel Jarre's EoN generative music app

Generated image of EoN infinite music app

Generative music has a surprisingly long history... It goes back to an era that very much predates famous and often-quoted examples, like those of Brian Eno's Koan.

While Eno has made the term 'generative music' enter the public consciousness, what it denotes existed for many decades before.

In many ways its origins can be traced back to some stunningly innovative work from the 1950s, for example the first ever work entirely composed by a computer: the Illiac Suite from 1957. Even now, this string quartet remains a remarkably human and spirited work, especially considering that it was entirely generated via algorithmic means.

Another major landmark is Iannis Xenakis's pioneering work on the formalisation of music, i.e. approaching music from a mathematical, more specifically stochastic, angle - and creating the possibility of describing music as a stochastic process.

His revolutionary Musiques Formelles, published in 1963, was already based on his extensive analyses and experimentations dating back to the 1950s. It, too, was the basis for numerous computer compositions from the 1960s and later.

In a far less mathematical manner, electroacoustic experiments done with tape loops could be considered as early, and very much analogue, ways of creating generative music. The slow and mesmerising interplay of timing relationships between tape loops, as used by minimalist pioneers like Steve Reich, was used by many subsequently... even in Brian Eno's Music For Airports, almost a decade after Reich's seminal It's Gonna Rain.

The explosion and affordability of personal computers and mobile devices meant that myriad software creations, including phone apps, could bring generative music to the masses. The list of various algorithmic, including fractal-based, composition tools is quasi-endless by now.

After decades of efforts from aforementioned Brian Eno, too, comes yet another piece of software as an iOS app. It was launched under the name EoN by the ever-youthful Jean-Michel Jarre, with software coding by Alexis Zbik and Vianney Apreleff.

Conceptually, it has its roots situated closer to the area of generative music from the realm of certain computer games, where considerable amount of human-composed music material is re-combined / re-arranged by software.

However, in the case of EoN, the result is structured as an actual album. Whilst it relies on seven hours of music composed by Jarre, the software ends up generating a potentially infinite album.

Furthermore, it alters the result every time anybody runs it - so it produces myriad instances of evolving music, in some ways turning the ephemeral and local (i.e. the moment and the personal instance of the app used by a certain person) into something eternal and expansive.

Thus, philosophically, it is an interesting exercise, especially as the resulting concept album is not just some slowly floating ambient drone as, alas, some generative music ends up being. The demo illustrates just how varied the resulting musical output can be.

Another notable aspect is that one does not just end up with the generated music: there are endless generated visual effects, too, hence the experience can become quite mesmerising indeed.

As musical elements are endlessly re-arranged into evolving constructs, EoN is an interesting combination of algorithmic, accidental, and pre-composed approaches to generative music. Using Jarre's original material, not only the music gets infinitely re-combined in countless ways, but each specific 'instance' of the infinite album is different. If one re-starts it, it will generate yet another different album... and it is up to us, and the available electricity supply, how long we let it play.

In terms of duration, this 'infinite' album certainly goes beyond the mere 639 years that the organ version of John Cage's As Slow As Possible will take to perform... assuming that batteries or any electrical energy source connected to the device running EoN lasts...