In the fall of 2022, a post on Hacker News led me to discover the Music Mouse, a web implementation of Laurie Spiegel’s original idea.

I was deeply impressed, not only by Spiegel’s original concepts but the quality of this implementation. Tracking down its developer Tero Parviainen was easy, but that led me to a treasure trove of Tero’s pedogogical, illustrative and typically interactive web audio work. From a tour-de-force survey of How Generative Music Works (originally presented at Ableton Loop) to the delightful Euclidean Rythm Explorer his work was deep, beautiful, instructive and inspiring.

Because I myself am trying to grapple with what web audio means for the future, Tero seemed like a great person to invite to ADC. As it turned out, however, we talked about a lot more than that; our conversation ranged across many different aspects of the looming “AI” revolution in music, the experience of and description of music, the past, present and future of generative music and so much more.

I can’t say that I was looking forward to editing another 3 hours of audio that was at least half filled with my own voice, but as it turned out, this was almost as great to listen to again as it was to have in the first place. I hope you enjoy it too.

Technical note: apologies several seconds of horribly distorted mic signal early on in the recording – I really need to get a new cable between my preamp and audio interface. I also apologize for the presence of a gentle “clicking” sound when I am speaking, especially in the later parts of our chat. A condenser mic is much too sensitive to be using a fidget toy close by. Hopefully you won’t find it too intrusive.

The above player uses Ogg/Vorbis, which Safari and iOS users can’t play by default, thanks to choices made by Apple. Below is an MP3 version for the poor souls left behind by their platform makers.