Structure Inside Music and our Daily Lives

While listening to Alexandra talk about her work and how the use of motifs are essential in driving a common theme, I started thinking about how structure is comforting and can be found everywhere in all forms of music. A motif is a dominant or recurring idea usually in film music. They are used to represent the appearance of a character on screen. For instance, if the evil villain appears then a small repeating melody possibly using lower frequency notes in a more minor aggressive tone will be used, so the listener will be made aware of the character’s bad intentions. Although I wouldn’t consider motifs as conventional musical structure due to their appearance in untimely locations in the chronology of a piece, they are still structured around the action on screen. Even when thinking back to Jessica Ekomane’s ‘Multivocal’, steady pulses with one millisecond difference in tempo creates organic and interesting poly rhythm that evolves slowly over time. These can still be considered structured as the pulses start at the same time and the piece ends once the pulses have reconvened, pulsing at the same time again.

Thinking about this led me to consider how I would go about creating an unstructured piece of music myself. It’s human nature to draw back on past experiences, muscle memory and personal biases whenever creating something new, whether that be consciously or subconsciously. From there I decided to use vcv rack, a modular synthesis emulator. I decided to use a module that sends random voltages at different rates to an oscillator and a euclidean rhythm generator clocked to the random module to create a beat. I realised that A, although in name the random module I was using was random, I in fact could choose the rate at which the module sent the voltages. And B, The euclidean rhythm generator isn’t actually random as it’s based off a mathematical formula that limits the number of steps in the pattern to 16, meaning there is still some semblance of structure. Furthermore it made me think how, although machines have endless random possibilities, a person is still required to control and create these possibilities, limiting the machine to the person’s knowledge of the software/hardware they’re using.