A single note, played once and never again in the same manner, stakes a curious claim upon time. In generative music, chance occupies not the edges but the very centre of the territory. Consider the weighted random processes of Max/MSP or SuperCollider, where an envelope’s attack is determined afresh at every cycle by a stochastic distribution. Musicians set boundaries: the probability of a note event, say, 0.65, or a rhythm drifting fractionally within a given window, but the emergence—the pulse—belongs to the algorithmic winds.

It is a subtle authority, this act of delegation. The composer draws the fence lines, defines the bias, but relinquishes the mantle of final decider. A patch is seeded, its potential unfolded not in obedience to sequence but in response to a grammar of possible outcomes. An evolving drone in SuperCollider, for instance, may modulate its filter cutoff randomly within a 300 Hz–600 Hz sweep, sometimes swelling, other times thinning, as if the process listens inwardly to its own polyrhythmic digestion.

The listener, meanwhile, occupies a tense, unresolved space. Presence is tinged with unease—waiting for the pattern to recur, knowing it will not, or not in recognisable terms. Here, generativity is not mere novelty, but a challenge to our ailing faith in repetition and prediction. These are musics without alibi: emerging, unfixed, inviting us to follow without the false comfort of return.