Human vs. (Marketing) Machine (Patreon)

Back in June 2016, ahead of the release of No Man's Sky, 65 played at a digital arts festival in Barcelona called Sonar+D.

This was a special, one-off 65daysofstatic live show in which we premiered unique variations of music from the forthcoming game.

To complicate everything, at the time of the festival Joe would only have recently emerged from keyhole surgery on his shoulder and so wouldn't be able to pick up or play a guitar. Or in fact do much of anything with his left hand. Normally we just wouldn't have played until he had recovered, but with the juggernaut of the Sony Playstation marketing machine bearing down on us, it wasn't quite so simple to pull out. (Plus, you know, we really wanted to finally play Sonar.)

The combination of all these pressures led us, at one point, to this unusual question: what generative music techniques could be employed to build a No Man's Sky instrument that would be playable with one hand, but be more engaging than the typical effects achievable within a single knob or fader movement?

The video above shows what we built to answer this question. It uses a combination of a piece of software called FMOD (this is what you can see in the video), that would be attached to a simple UI to be built in Unity.

What you see in the video looks initially familiar to anybody who uses a computer to make music. A left-to-right timeline on the screen that the playhead moves through, playing audio as it goes. In fact, this is an entirely non-linear timeline. Each clip you can see is actually a collection of a number of pieces of audio, and each clip follows different rules. Generally speaking, if a clip is active, it is playing samples from a pool of audio at fixed or semi-random intervals. As the single knob at the top of the screen labelled 'cluster' is slowly turned up, the song builds itself by activating more clips and adjusting FX parameters. Whole structures of noise can be erected and collapsed with a single turn of a dial. The video is a live capture of a 'performance' of this song. But every performance would be different.

For a number of reasons, we never used this at the show. Apart from anything else, we had come to the conclusion that the best way to showcase a non-linear, generative-infinite soundtrack was with an entirely manually-composed, fully linear show that hit all the various different soundscapes and was guaranteed to show off all the biggest bangers. Leaving the entire show to the whims of our dumb generative logic was something we were not yet foolish enough to try. The show went well, so you would have thought we'd have learned something from this, but then we spent two years developing Decomposition Theory, so maybe we really didn't.

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N.B. due to a miscommunication about the set being filmed as part of the festival, we never properly documented it. A random video with terrible sound from YouTube that caught a little of it is the only proof we have that any of this ever existed...