Rouilleux: The Fold

1. The Fold is a shape-shifting, ever-changing music album where each play is different.
2. The Fold is designed for repeated listens, gradually expanding on compositions and motifs.
3. Each individual version of The Fold is in the form of an EP.
4. The Fold is a closed generative system without any artificial intelligence involvement.

Idea
The main reason for creating this kind of shape-shifting album is the notion that musical ideas and compositions are not finite entities which are supposed to be delimited, established and fixated in the form of an audio signal, but rather they organically change in time and can exist in many different forms simultaneously. Therein lies the problem with recordings as we know them –⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ they trap the music in one fixed canonical form, potentially flattening the recorded material. The goal of The Fold was to find a way to let the compositions breathe and exist in a variety of their forms, without making the listening experience unnecessarily tedious. The solution turned out to be the use of generative, algorithmic and aleatoric music principles which can overcome the limitations of a recording in its single, finite form and offer many different approaches to the representation of multiplicity and diversity.

Build
The album is based on hours of prerecorded audio material divided into parts, each of which has been assigned several properties for the purposes of the algorithm – information about the key/mode, instruments used, lyrics, relationship to other parts, etc. Based on these properties, the algorithm then selects a sequence of parts in a way that satisfies the conditions defined by the author. These conditions ensure that the generated audio works as a meaningful unit lasting 15–20 minutes. Decisions that are not subject to rules that constrain the algorithm are then intentionally left to random selection, resulting in a large number of possible outcomes. This creates a closed, self-contained, definite system that does not use any external input (e.g. from the listener) or processes (e.g. by some kind of artificial intelligence).

A new approach to generative music
Generative music as we know it and as it was defined by the likes of Brian Eno, has two main guiding principles: the music should play for as long as the listener wants it to play, and during this time it should constantly change and evolve without recognizable repetitions. The Fold diverges from this concept from the outset: the total length of each version is intentionally limited to about 15–20 minutes. The reason for this is that whereas Eno-inspired generative music focuses on variation on the temporal, potentially unlimited level, the goal here is variation on the level of a cohesive album (EP) and its structure. Both principles are concerned with creating a system that generates music that is ever-changing, albeit with different intentions – the former is usually used for building slowly evolving soundscapes and spaces, the latter is intended to be used for gradual exploration of a collection of songs, their interactions with each other and to reveal connections that are not apparent at first glance. Thus The Fold builds on the legacy of generative music, but approaches it from an angle that brings a new way of listening to comprehensive musical work that differs both from traditional recordings and algorithmic systems unlimited in time.