Make Your Own Luck

In “The surprising thing about musical surprise,” philosopher and musician Jenny Judge refers to the experience of listening to the first thirty seconds of Led Zeppelin’s¹ ‘Black Dog’: “whatever else you might say about the experience, an adequate discussion of its phenomenal character would have to mention musical surprise.”²

The surprise in ‘Black Dog’ is rhythmic; the guitar riff disrupts the regular sense of meter³ established by the vocal line. That this surprise was deliberately designed becomes clear when considering the effort that went into making ‘Black Dog’, its relation⁴ to Fleetwood Mac’s⁵ ‘Oh Well’, and something not mentioned in these two articles. When you turn the volume up⁶, you can hear John Bonham—probably with his drumsticks—giving metric indications at 0:11 (two clicks), 0:23 (one click), 0:30 (one click), and 0:34 (one click). Was the musical surprise so essential that it had to be executed perfectly to happen, with the risk of being “spoiled” by revealing the mechanics or trick? J. Brackett⁷ hints at the answer by quoting the musicians during a rehearsal of the song ‘In My Time of Dying’:

Bonham: “Well you can’t count from where you stop ’cause your vocals might be a different – I mean – your voice just might go off a beat and we’re gonna be f…”

Plant: “Ah, but if you do that, it’ll be like ‘Black Dog’ then it gives me room to move and solo…”

Bonham: “Yes, but the reason we did ‘Black Dog’ is because we counted it and you did it afterwards … That’s the only way we can do this.”

The vocals were overdubbed⁸ later to give the impression of spontaneity and freedom. On live versions, one can hear how greater metrical regularity is established, which allows the band to perform in sync but restricts its freedom. Musical surprises come in many forms and can involve rhythm, harmony, melody, timbre, dynamics, color, and so on.

There is a debate about the nature⁹ of these musical surprises, which fall under the category of perceptual surprises and are characterized as frustrating because they thwart prior expectations.

If musical surprises are such an interesting element for composers, performers, and the audience, it is worth investigating whether they can be generated and repeated. Is there a formula or method, a process to make musical surprises arise? And what happens to the surprise if you listen to a piece over and over again? I turned to a field of music I had some prior experience in: music and audio for video games. I’ll build on previous personal projects that all use the same or related audio technologies but each focus on one specific topic. Instead of rehashing the techniques, tools, and workflows I already had experience with, I wanted to use the potential of this research to further explore the specific chance and random elements that are central to adaptive audio but are also making their way into music creation apps, generative music software, and devices. These random features intrigued me the most and are also the ones that were only present as side functions or sketches in my other projects.

How can randomness be made to work in the creator’s favor and capture the audience’s interest?

Serendip Revisited

The word serendipity only exists in the English language. It was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754 in a letter referring to an episode from the Persian tale “The Three Princes of Serendip”. The three princes from today’s Sri Lanka traveled the world “making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of…”.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines serendipity as the “faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for”, the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary as “​the fact of something interesting or pleasant happening by chance”, and the Oxford English Dictionary as “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident”.

Today, serendipity is overused as a buzzword in the humanities and natural sciences. In 2009, journalist Richard Boyle¹⁰ lamented that the commonly accepted definitions did not do justice to Walpole’s “more complex and metaphorical original meaning”. This holds especially true if one considers its use in natural sciences.

It is in the Oxford Reference, not mentioned by Boyle, that one can find a definition that is closer to the original meaning envisioned by Walpole:

“Discovery of new information by a happy accident when actually seeking something altogether different. A famous example was the discovery by the British medical scientist Alexander Fleming (1881–1955) of the antibiotic property of penicillin mold.”

For neuroscientist David R. Colman:

“Serendipity plays an important part in research of all kinds, but it operates only in a special environment; as Pasteur famously stated, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ In research, what serendipity really means in practical terms is that scientists discover things in the course of their investigations that they were not looking for. And these new findings are often not the products of cold logic.”¹¹

I’ll make use of the above definition in my research on randomness and chance to create surprise, expectation, resolution, and alternatives, but the primary focus will be on the more precise definition of serendipity with the idea of adding and mixing elements from a composition that will appear on an album and in an app.

Artistic Research Focused on Creating a Changing Music Video Clip

Artistic research¹² projects will display most of the following features:

1. “The art work is the focal point. The art work tops the list of the priorities, from places 1 to 22, and still continuing”.
2. “Artistic experientiality [_sic] is the very core of the research._”
3. “Artistic research must be self-reflective, self-critical and an outwardly-directed communication.”
4. “The placement of artistic research in the historical and disciplinary context.”
5. “A diversity of research methods, presentation methods and communication tools and their commitment to the needs and demands of each particular case.”
6. “Emphasizing the fruitfulness and necessity of the dynamic research group situation, which in a collective effort provides the closest critical environment, the protective realm for experimentation and the ability to share thoughts and emotions.”

I’ll consider points 1, 2, and 5 as most relevant to my undertaking.

One of the main compositions used for the app will serve as the base for my research on creating an interactive video clip that offers musical surprises but keeps the composer’s intentions intact. Can serendipity happen for those who are prepared and put in some effort, planting the seeds?

While adaptive audio in itself, as used in multimedia projects, mostly video games, is an interesting subject, I’d like to focus on one particular aspect: randomness as a surprise for the composer, performer, and listener. Randomness as a feature has become ubiquitous in music software and hardware (cf. methodology). “Which tools do you use to make music?” might not be one of the most interesting questions, albeit one of the most asked by musicians in popular music circles, but tools do have an impact on music making, on the creative process, and can expand or restrict the horizons of the possible and desirable.¹³ The reasons for using a well-established technology versus more advanced applications, from algorithmic and AI music research or even well-documented tools such as Max, Pure Data, or SuperCollider (cf. glossary), will also be explained in the methodology chapter. The main reason is that I was looking into technologies that would make it possible to create and publish an end product (video clip with changing music and restricted moments of interaction) in different media accessible to the largest possible audience: apps (iOS, Android), computer platforms (Mac, Linux, PC), web browsers, and even game consoles (Xbox, Switch, etc.).

Update: the end product is out. After this thesis was submitted, the project reached its audience. The free The Aquatic Museum app has been available on the App Store since April 2023. The album The Aquatic Museum followed at the end of May 2023 on CD and streaming platforms; its track “Souvenir Shop (Download the App)” is the fixed counterpart of the ever-changing version in the app. Album, app, singles, and band are presented on the project website, theaquaticmuseum.com. More details can be found in the process chapter.

Furthermore, examples in the inspiration and process chapters will draw on projects I’m working on, on my studies with my teachers at the Maastricht Conservatorium, and on the Karnatic Rhythm to Western Music Program on South Indian rhythmic concepts that I’m following at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam.

The reflection report published in this website format seems best adapted to combine advanced teaching research and MA research because it focuses on surprise and chance, offers wiki-style cross-references and links to external references, and also uses the same technologies that allow the reader to experience and grasp the different examples.

The literature review (II.) succinctly summarizes the research on algorithmic music and provides further links and examples. The methodology section (III.) gives an overview of the tools I used with hands-on examples to interact with the music. Interactive examples are also available in the ATS research: randomness and surprise in teaching. In the process documentation part (IV.), I shed light on the Aquatic Museum album and app creation process but also extend the research into more experimental territory. This intro section (I.) is rounded off with an overview of personal projects that gave me the idea and impulse for this research.