2026 / Multichannel Audio

The Computer Music I Always Wanted

This project considers notions of technological progress in relation to artistic lineage and musical development. It uses artificial intelligence to reconstruct an unrealized work of juvenilia while employing perceptual phenomena to reflect on historical change.

As a student at the turn of the millennium, I imagined a computer music composition that subtly shifts between texture and polyphony. The idea drew on concepts of tuning and algorithmic form that I encountered through the work of James Tenney, whose 1969 computer music work For Anne (rising) staged continuous ascent. Unable to program the system I envisioned, I eventually abandoned the project.

Now, a quarter century later, I’ve realized the original idea using AI coding agents. Yet my project complicates notions of linear development, as today’s technologies seem to foreclose as much as they facilitate. If Tenney’s composition suggested a kind of postwar faith in upward movement, my work reflects a present marked by profound ambivalence through sounds that drift between ascent and descent.

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