The The Reactional Technology: An Artistic Practice-Informed Approach to Developing a Generative Music Engine

Abstract

This paper describes the process of creating a tool for composing and improvising music, now called Reactional Music, and its development from being a personal tool to becoming a musical engine for interactive experiences in several fields, for instance video games. By tracking the gradual development of the technology over time, with examples of how it has been used in different projects, the paper tries to highlight how the artistic practice has informed the development and vice versa. The Reactional technology is a generative music engine that works by predefining musical parameters and letting them be controlled by any type of input data. The original use case is to control many musical parameters with just a few streams of input data, in that way creating a tool where complex musical structures can be generated and improvised upon in an intuitive way. This paper is focused on technical descriptions, but will also provide perspectives on the creative aspects of composing music and developing software in parallel. The main contribution of this paper is to map the complex process of developing the technology, and the interactions between software development and the artistic projects that have been using the technology, thereby providing input to the technological development.