Pat Carroll

  • Building Alien Structures in The Grid

    Exploring a Single, Evolving Texture

    Last night I had a great time composing in Bitwig’s The Grid. I focused on building a single, really complex texture. The music felt like it was constructing solid, physical forms rather than telling a traditional, multi-part story. The processing gave it a huge amount of energy and tactility.

    Even within that singular focus, there was still growth. I built the piece through an improvised take, recording automation across a range of parameters inside The Grid. It made me think about how a “single sound” can actually evolve: filtering, gain boosts, spatial tweaks, envelope modulation changes, increases in noise, panning voices outward, and playing with stereo space.

    These choices became the “musical narrative.” Large, reverberant spaces made the sound feel huge and slightly washy, building tension, which then resolved as I pulled the reverb back—suddenly placing the sound right in front of the listener.

    Working in The Grid was simply fun. I love this kind of composition—building a complex modular system to generate sound. The Grid remains the most intuitive object-based programming environment I’ve used. It’s not as deep as MaxMSP, but it’s still incredibly powerful. Max might be something I eventually lean into, but for now, I’m loving The Grid.

    There’s a state I slip into while writing this music where I almost lose track of how the system is actually producing its sounds. I sit back and feel like I’ve “lost control” in a good way—as if the system has developed a mind of its own. That sense of collaboration between artist and instrument is something I treasure.

    Processing

    Processing was crucial. After listening to the music of emptyset, I wanted to explore smashing voices together to form a new gestalt sound. Toward the end of The Grid’s signal chain, I combined tonal and noise oscillators before running them through various colouring tools—mainly distortions.

    There was always a tricky line between not enough and too much, but when the voices were driven together, they fused in a way that felt like gluing on overdrive. The noise filling the top end was especially interesting. Outside of The Grid, placing a reverb before an overdrive added a subtle widening and sense of realism—along with a touch of muddiness and clutter. Those “negative” qualities actually helped create and resolve tension.

    Science Fiction, Discovery, and the Unknowable

    What draws me so deeply to this music? It feels linked to the science fiction I’ve been reading—an exploration of the unknowable, the alien, the never-before-encountered. I’ve always gravitated toward novel experiences, and I want the musical equivalent of that.

    The avant-garde often reaches for this territory, but so much of the music I heard studying at the Con lacked any sort of emotional resonance for me. The technique and attitude were definitely cool, and I appreciated the desire to push the envelope, but the music didn’t feel like much to me. It was innovative in the field of compositional process and techniques, but not in the sense of musical emotional conversation. What I want is discovery, wonder, and a slight sense of danger. The music I’ve been working on feels extreme, even a bit violent, but in a way that pushes boundaries of expression, not just compositional process. This approach to music isn’t written to attempt to ‘blow up’ as an artist; it’s about exploring sound in ways that haven’t been explored before, and sharing that experience.

    One of my students said the piece “sounds like I’m in a massive spaceship,” and (obviously) I loved that comparison. There’s no literal narrative being told, no clear meaning meaning, no love story unfolding—it instead attempts to place the listener inside a structure.

    I think of the scene at the end of the film adaptation of Annihilation, when Lena encounters that alien being/structure. She’s bewildered by it; it is unknowable. Is it conscious? Is it even alive? That feeling—of encountering something truly alien and new—is what I want while making the music, and what I hope the listener experiences too.

    That sense of stepping into the unknown is exactly what I’ve always loved about science fiction, research & education, and composition.

  • Thoughts on “Raft” — Stephen Baxter

     

    I finished Raft by Stephen Baxter last night. I bought Xeelee: An Omnibus last week because I want to give the series a proper go. Raft was the first book in the collection, only 162 pages long (though written in tiny text).

    The writing felt a little cold at times. The characters weren’t very deep, and a few of them even merged in my mind as I read—everyone felt a bit two-dimensional. The setting was also surprisingly difficult to visualise. It’s a super weird universe: the Belt as a ring of cabins tied together by ropes, orbiting a burnt-out star (basically a sphere of iron being mined) floating in a nebula, itself orbiting a core. Then there’s the Raft, which I pictured as a giant bowl-shaped structure in a higher orbit. But even with those mental images, I often struggled to picture the scenes he described.

    A lot of events just… happened, without much build-up or emotional fallout. At one point the protagonist straight up murders another young boy, and there are no real repercussions. It was jarring.

    I’d heard that character work isn’t Baxter’s thing—the ideas are. And the ideas were cool, all centred around gravity and this strange fusion of physics and chemistry. It’s definitely not your typical fun, adventure-style sci-fi. The whole experience was just a bit weird, tonally and conceptually.

    While I’ve painted this in a slightly negative light, I did actually enjoy it. I just think I would’ve struggled with another hundred pages of the same. It’s a neat story with some wild ideas, even if it never quite called to me throughout the day.

    3.5/5

  • The Spectrum of Authorship

    Authorship and Collaboration with AI

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about authorship when it comes to making creative work through collaboration with AI. I’ve been particularly interested in how authorship changes once we start relying more heavily on technology to make our work.

    There’s a spectrum, I think, that runs from one extreme to the other. On one end is the composer who creates something entirely from themselves; literally just their body and their voice, no technology involved. They might sing, clap, and stomp in a purely improvised performance, creating an original work that is entirely ‘human’. As we move along the spectrum, we start introducing tools and technologies that extend what the body can do.

    At these early ends of the spectrum, that might be the human–machine collaborations of a violin or a cello. The performer still feels like the author of the work, but their authorship is now distributed across their body and the instrument. The music is only possible through their interaction with that tool.

    Then we move into the world of recording. Technologies like microphones, tape machines, and DAWs allow us not only to capture sound but to shape and reorganise it. Here, authorship starts to spread out a little further. You might record fragments from synthesisers, field recordings, speech, or existing works, rearrange them, sculpt them, and construct a piece that exists mostly through the editing and transformation of material. The composition becomes a kind of organisation of material — structuring sound to give it some aesthetic meaning. In these contexts, the composer’s work entirely relies on the capabilities of modern technologies.

    Tools, Systems, and Co-Creation

    Things become more interesting when we get to technologies that don’t just record or process sound but actually start generating or influencing the musical material. MIDI effects in a DAW are a perfect example of this. They operate not on the level of concrete audio (as synthesisers and audio effects do), but on the level of abstract musical content — notes, rhythms, and chords. It’s possible to send a single note into a rack of MIDI effects, automate a range of parameters, and end up with a sophisticated chord sequence using inversions, borrowed chords, and extensions. The composer here is engaging in complex approaches to technology. But who is making the chords?

    Or consider an arpeggiator, which transforms a single chord into a patterned melody. It’s not just amplifying the human input; it’s creating new abstract musical content (the notes rather than the sound of those notes).

    The technology suggests material, and the composer reacts to it in a form of collaboration — approving it (keeping it in the work) or rejecting it (trying another set of parameters). The composer can unexpectedly stumble upon highly sophisticated ideas through these sorts of processes. They’re relying on the technology to produce their complexity. Is this any different from a composer sitting at a piano, and importantly, relying on the piano to find their complex harmonic sequences?

    These sorts of systems blur the line between tool and collaborator. We’re still inclined to say that the resulting piece belongs to, and is authored by, the composer, even though the technology is now contributing directly to the creation of the material itself.

    Further along the spectrum, we get to a stage where we start working with technologies that behave more like agents — systems that can generate musical ideas on their own, improvise, or respond to us in real time. These could be algorithmic improvisers, generative systems, or AI collaborators.

    At this point, the question of authorship starts to unravel further. Who is the author here? Is it the composer, who initiated and guided the process? Is it shared with the coder or designer who built the system? What about the AI itself, which is now capable of producing new abstract and concrete material? We could say that it’s still the composer’s work — another case of using technology to extend creative capacity — but it does feel slightly different. There’s an agency to the process that pushes back, that seems to create with the composer-performer rather than for them.

    Sampling, Assembly, and the Role of the Composer

    Running parallel to these sorts of approaches is the culture of sampling. You can make a track entirely out of material from Splice — a drum loop from one person, a chord progression from another, and a melody from someone else. In these scenarios, almost every building block of the music comes from other creators — not to mention the technologies that went into creating and shaping those materials. Yet the sense of authorship still rests with the one who assembles it.

    This kind of authorship is about reorganisation: curating, reframing, and recomposing pre-existing materials. It’s not unlike crate-digging or collage. Sure, the composer is not inventing the raw materials, but they’re reorganising them into new configurations, giving them new contexts and meanings, often drastically different from their origins. Authorship here becomes less about creating from nothing and more about the composer’s methods of moving things around — how they impose structure, taste, and intention.

    In these settings, the composer engages with technologies or the processing of sourced material to create the core ideas and sounds. But their authorship comes from the assembly of these into musical structures.

    Harvesting Authorship in the Ecosystem of Creativity

    At the furthest end of the spectrum is the artist who types a prompt into an AI model, waits a few seconds, and receives a fully formed track — a finished .wav file that they can release immediately. Here, the idea of authorship becomes extremely fragile. Who made it?

    It doesn’t quite make sense to call the human the ‘composer’ of the work. The creative labour has been abstracted away; the AI is the one producing the abstract and concrete musical materials and organising them into a musical structure. The human is left as the initiator, prompter, or commissioner.

    But even here, it’s not completely clear-cut. If the AI outputs something editable — an entire DAW project, a SuperCollider patch, or even a .wav file that is then split into stems — the human can intervene, reshape it, and make it their own, potentially clawing back some authorship. In other words, the artist begins to harvest authorship back from the system. They inject themselves into the material, react to it, transform it, and in doing so, reclaim a sense of ownership. The process becomes a dialogue: a push and pull between automation and intention.

    How is this process different from getting a sketch or full piece sent over from a collaborator, which the composer then pulls apart, edits, remixes, and makes ‘their own’? (I’m referring here to the differences concerning authorship, not the morals of replacing human collaboration of this kind with AI-human collaboration.)

    Harvesting authorship describes the act of taking something that wasn’t entirely yours to begin with and imprinting yourself upon it through labour, curation, and interpretation. The more you interact, the more you reclaim.

    Across this whole spectrum, from singing with your body to collaborating with generative systems, the underlying question doesn’t really change. Modern techniques of music-making have pushed us further away from that human-only end of the spectrum. But composition is still about how much of yourself you put into the process, and how much the system gives back. What shifts is where the creativity sits, and what forms it takes — in the body, in the workflow, in the code, or in the back-and-forth between the composer and their technology.

    It’s also not just technology that we interact with in the creative process. Consider the interplay between the composer and the spaces they compose with in mind, or the audience members themselves. What about the composer drawing inspiration from biophonic and geophonic sources — birdsong, thunder, waves? Music-making is thus never a single-creator scenario. There is no single, individual author. Authorship, in the sense of ‘who made this?’, is a question of a vast ecosystem of culture, environment, and technology.

    Maybe authorship isn’t about who made what from scratch, but about how creative intentions move through systems. It’s less about purity or originality, and more about interaction, orientation, and the ways we steer complexity into coherence — how an author of a creative work takes a set of inputs as material and shapes them into something aesthetically valuable.

    In that sense, using AI in the creative process isn’t the ‘end of authorship’. It’s a change, for sure, but it’s really just another point on a spectrum that composition has always existed on.

  • The Desire for Ownership in Creative Work

    What is it about building things through sound, words or code, that I’m drawn to? As I mentioned recently, I don’t have much experience with writing code, but I’ve always felt drawn towards the ideas. I’ve felt some deep enjoyment when working in platforms like MaxMSP or Bitwig’s The Grid to make musical systems. Why do I like these things? I think it’s the creativity it offers — the ability to make something that didn’t exist before. It has felt great to build my website recently, tweaking it until it feels like my own. I find that it’s similar to my music making: There’s a satisfaction in seeing my ideas materialise, an aesthetic that feels personal, that reflects some combination of discipline and taste.

    But I’ve been wondering lately: is this feeling of desiring ownership, of uniqueness healthy? Where does it come from? And why is it so central to how I/we think about creativity and self-expression today?

    The Self as Property

    To answer this, it helps to go back a few centuries, to some origins of liberal thought. The 17th-century philosopher John Locke proposed that every person “owns” themselves: their body, labour, and by extension, whatever they create through that labour. This simple notion that selfhood and property are intertwined became the bedrock of modern liberalism and capitalism.

    When I write music, words, or build a website, I’m effectively performing a Lockean ritual: I’m mixing my labour with raw digital material, and the result feels mine. This logic is so deeply ingrained that it feels natural rather than cultural. The creative act becomes not just an act of making but of claiming. In a world that often leaves us feeling interchangeable (as users, customers, citizens), the ability to make something that bears our imprint is attractive.

    But this Lockean inheritance also shapes the morals, values and emotional register of creativity itself. In other words, it reshapes the purpose of creativity. It teaches us that to create is to possess, and that possession is the proof of individuality. Even in immaterial digital spaces, that same grammar of ownership persists: files, repositories of knowledge, music collections, usernames, intellectual property. The “I” and the “mine” are inseparable.

    The Romantic Individual Artist

    Locke gave us the legal language of ownership, but the Romantics provided the emotional one. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists and writers began to describe creativity not as skilled craft, but as a form of inner revelation. The artist, in this new perspective, was a solitary figure channelling something authentic from within. They became a genius rather than a tradesperson.

    I feel that this Romantic idea still haunts every creative field today, from music and painting to programming and design. When I make something which (I believe) “only I could have made,” I’m invoking this Romantic lineage. The thrill of creativity comes from the belief that I’ve distilled an ephemeral piece of self into form — that the work bears a trace of my personality that can’t be replicated.

    But it’s worth remembering that this somewhat egotistical, borderline narcissistic notion of the unique, ‘authentic’ creator is historically specific. It emerged alongside and in revolt against aspects of industrial capitalism, as standardised production began to threaten the very idea of the individual. The Romantic artist was, in some sense, a protest figure — a defence of human uniqueness against the machine.

    But doesn’t that same myth now fuel the culture of ‘personal brands’ and individual distinction that capitalism depends on?

    Marketing this Self

    In our time, creativity and ownership have fused into something subtler. We no longer merely own things; we curate and display them as expressions of identity. The personal website, playlist, or socials feed functions less as a possession and more as a performance of taste. Platforms promise self-expression, but within templates designed for comparison, data extraction, and profit.

    In these contexts, the language of “authenticity” that pervades social media is no longer opposed to capitalism: it’s one of its operating systems. To be “authentic” online is to express individuality through consumption and production. The result is a paradox: the more we try to assert our uniqueness, the more we participate in the machinery that standardises it.

    This is perhaps why the act of building a website has felt different to me. To build something that lives and functions outside the algorithmic feeds has felt like a reclaiming of agency. If I have to update a post because I spot an error, I don’t have to worry about being ‘downgraded’ by the algorithm. I don’t have to operate within the specified templates of socials platforms. Building the site itself brings the pleasure of building infrastructure for your own meaning, not just content within someone else’s frame. Sure, there are still some boundaries on a platform like WordPress, but nowhere near as much as on Instagram or TikTok.

    Yet even in the context of a personal website, the logic of ownership shadows the joy: the pride in saying “I made this,” the anxiety of imitation, the impulse to protect one’s creative space from dilution.

    The Commons

    There is, of course, another story: the open-source tradition, which treats things like code as a shared commons. In this world, creativity isn’t defined by possession but by contribution. The act of making is collaborative, cumulative, and porous. A line of code written by one person may become the seed for another’s idea halfway across the world.

    This model challenges the Lockean and Romantic assumptions that creativity belongs to the solitary individual. It reframes authorship as participation rather than expression. The concept of “Musicking” runs parallel, understanding music as a communal, social practice, rather than the product of the individual in their isolated studio.

    While the “commons” can become, paradoxically, another frontier of extraction (the language of community and sharing is often co-opted by tech companies that profit from collective labour without redistributing ownership) there’s something profoundly humane in the idea that creativity can be distributed. It suggests that meaning doesn’t have to originate from within a single self: it emerges between selves, through systems and interactions. In a way, this vision aligns more closely with how art, language, and culture have always worked: as collective enterprises, shaped by traditions, tools, and shared histories.

    Making, Being

    So when I find joy in making a piece of music, building a website, or creating a piece of generative art, what am I really responding to? Part of it is the tactile pleasure of shaping something from nothing, the same satisfaction that a potter might feel. But part of it, I think, is ideological: the sense that my creation is a declaration of selfhood in a world that constantly fragments it.

    That feeling of “this is mine” is both personal and political. It reassures me that I exist as a free individual, that I can leave a mark that’s not immediately absorbed into the collective stream. Yet it also ties me into a long historical chain of ideas about selfhood, property, and authenticity. These ideas are not neutral, but deeply shaped by the economic and cultural systems that produced them.

    Perhaps the healthiest relationship to creativity lies somewhere between possession and participation. Between the Lockean claim and the open-source contribution. To make something that feels truly yours without imagining that its meaning begins or ends with you.

    The Meaning of Making

    In the end, the act of creation, whether through sound, words, or code, returns to something that is perhaps pre-ideological: the quiet joy of bringing something into being. When I shape a sound, I’m engaged in dialogue with the material world. We deem this a powerful trait: the gods are the “creators”, and some of our deepest stories are creation myths. But that dialogue doesn’t have to serve ownership or identity. It can simply be a way of experiencing the world through making, by engaging in some of reality’s most fundamental features, like pressure, harmonics, logic, and structure.

    The modern myth of authenticity tells us that creativity reveals who we are. But perhaps it does something subtler: it shows us that we are — that existence can take form, that meaning can be assembled, however temporarily, from the raw materials of thought, bits, and sound.

    To create, then, is not only to proclaim “this is mine!”, but also to question, “what am I part of?”