Moments is a metacreative work that explores Moment-form, a term coined to describe music that avoids directed narrative curves, and instead exists within stasis. The music is meant to remain in the background, and not draw attention to itself.

Moments continues the composer’s research into musebots – independent intelligent musical agents – that both generate an overall musical structure, and then create the details within that structure. Various musebots assume roles within the creation and performance of each 10 minute composition An OrchestratorBot decides which musebots are to be used in a given composition, based upon what the main ParamBot generates for the individual moments in the composition. A separate musebot generates the harmony for each moment, based upon the complexity required by the ParamBot. Lastly, a Conductor keeps all the musebots coordinated in musical time. Each composition is unique, and generated on the spot. The musebots are “intelligent”, in that they have learned about their environment, and communicate their intentions and coordinate conditions for collaborative machine composition.

Moments uses unique synthesis musebots – a granular synthesis-based GenoaBot and a resonant soundscape-based KitsilanoBot – as well as musebots that have access to all of Ableton Live’s 1200+ synthesis engines. These musebots – SienaBot and LondynBot – utilize machine-learning algorithms to select and control these internal synthesizers based upon the current context.

Ensembles are curated collections of multiple musebots.

Ensemble 1:

https://youtu.be/RMewJmE3GgE

Ensemble 4:

https://youtu.be/tpe0cNn_lTk

Ensemble 5:

https://youtu.be/BtN4gVld2M4

Ensemble 9:

https://youtu.be/csbWQ2RbLv0