You might not know Laura Escudé’s name, but there’s a good chance you’ve seen her work. As a live show programmer, she’s collaborated with Kanye West, JAY-Z, Logic and Charli XCX. She’s programmed music for Cirque du Soleil and American Idol.
And through her company, Electronic Creatives, she manages an entire team of programmers and playback engineers that’s expanded her client base even further, to include such artists as Drake, The Weeknd, Pentatonix and Harry Styles.
As one of the pioneers in live show programming — especially the use of Ableton Live software, now widely regarded as the industry standard — Escudé has helped reshape how the concert industry uses electronic music and digital playback across virtually every genre of music.
Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence make music composition easier than ever – because a machine is doing half the work. Could computers soon go it alone?
Most recently, producer Baauer – who topped the US charts in 2012 with his viral track Harlem Shake – made Hate Me with Lil Miquela, an artificial digital Instagram avatar.
“The first computer-generated score, a string quartet called the Illiac Suite, was developed in 1957 by Lejaren Hiller (MIT), and was met with massive controversy among the classical community.”
“Fast forward to 1980, and after an insufferable bout of composer’s block, California music professor David Cope began building a computer that could read music from a database written in numerical code.”
“YouTube singing sensation Taryn Southern has constructed an LP composed and produced completely by AI using a reworking of Cope’s methods.”
“Southern uses an open source AI platform called Amper to input preferences such as genre, instrumentation, key and beats per minute. Amper is an artificially intelligent music composer founded by film composers Drew Silverstein, Sam Estes and Michael Hobe.”
We all know about the Theremin (right?) but have you heard of the Pyrophone? … Ondes Martenot? The Cristal Baschet? What about the American Photoplayer?
Throughout history, musicians and instrument makers have been experimenting with different ways of producing sound and melody. Some of the contraptions created have become a standard in the musical world. The others, the ones that are more experimental or obscure, are pushing the borders of sound and inspiring musicians to pursue new horizons.
Probability Pack is a set of five innovative step sequencers and idea generators that add controlled randomization to any composition and performance process. Each sequencer has a unique way of introducing subtle or extreme randomization to patterns for unpredictable outcomes.
The pack includes Melodic Probability, Rhythmic Probability, and something called “Dr. Chaos”
