LO-06 Randomness

Random generation in music/synthesis has always confused me a bit, because part of the point of music (at least, what Western music theory says), is that music wants to fit into a pattern that is pleasing for the human ear, and that’s how tunes get stuck in our head and how we end up attached to a certain song. Randomness doesn’t often lean in the acoustically pleasing direction, because our ears are so attuned to patterns and tones. Even someone with little musical training or ability can guess if a note is incorrect, and will often have a visceral reaction to a wrong note played in a familiar melody. I was intrigued by this tutorial because it showed how to use randomness along with other elements within the Ableton software (confining notes to a certain scale, randomizing the note value within a number of choices, etc) to create something that, however randomly generated, still sounds pleasing to our ear.