‘EQUINOX’is a conceptual VST plugin designed to bring the excitement and unpredictability of live performance into the digital music space.
It empowers musicians to infuse their compositions with dynamic, ever-changing elements by randomly modulating effects and tweaking parameters based on user-defined controls. How far will you let creativity flow beyond your hands?
The creator of ‘Koan’ (Brian Eno) made this program because he felt like the ‘modern way of making and listening to music was boring’. He compared live performances to digitally made and recorded music and concluded that ‘live performances are better because there’s always a certain sense of unpredictability and excitement’. His answer to this conclusion was ‘Koan’, which was the first program to introduce the concept of ‘Generative music’.
With this program, users can create a musical composition that is constantly changing according to restrictions imposed by the user. This would result in never-ending randomised soundscapes that never (or rarely) repeat themselves. The entire soundscape would be composed out of computer-generated chord progressions based on a key provided by the user.
Meaning that you’re essentially listening to your computer making music. It’s an interesting concept, but after trying it out for a while, I noticed that this ‘generative music’ became extremely boring. Making a soundscape was fun, of course, but there is still no excitement.
A never-ending, slow-moving soundscape does not seem like an effective way of transferring the excitement of live-performed music into a digital space.
‘EQUINOX’ is a conceptual VST plugin that can be used to transform the stems (Individual instrumental tracks) of a human-made composition by tweaking different modulators randomly connected to various effects.
This project creates questions around human and machine agency within music.
- How much control are we willing to give to a computer while making music?
- What defines "authenticity" in music creation when computers contribute dynamically to the process?
- Is there an ethical boundary to how much creativity we delegate to machines in the art-making process?
- How does the interaction between machine and human agency redefine the concept of collaboration?
- Could this project inspire new ways of performing music live, with computers acting as dynamic co-creators?
Equinox is a groundbreaking VST plugin that brings the excitement and unpredictability of live performance into the digital music space. It empowers musicians to infuse their compositions with dynamic, ever-changing elements by randomly modulating effects and tweaking parameters based on user-defined controls. How far will you let creativity flow beyond your hands?