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Reflective Music |

Live-generated music for reflection

Descriptors: Reflective, peaceable, beautiful, ambient, generative, live, free-flowing, fluid, chance, calming, relaxing, cleansing, personal, creative, interesting, left-field, shareable

Infused With Meaning

Words are seeds that TTM can turn into melodies; it's your music.

The Perfect Blend

Use beautiful generative music to complement the melodies and complete your mix.

A Cosmic Brew

Underpinned by chance, reflective music is ideal for relaxation, mindfulness & contemplation.

Shareable "Peace"

Personal artistic creative expression is to be shared - its peaceable music!

Wotja Flow Mode on phone, tablet and TV

Reflective Music can be easily created in Wotja software

Our use of the term "Reflective Music" relates to music containing melodies derived from text, be that user entered or auto-generated by Wotja software.

These melodies are generated by a stochastic technique referred to as "Text to Music" (AKA "text-to-music" or "TTM").

It is the astract but repeatable link between text and melody gives the music it's special "reflective" property: a user connection, context or relevance.

When Text to Music is combined with Generative Music it becomes Reflectve Music, a music ideal for mindfulness, relaxation and meditation.

History of the term "Reflective Music"

See also: PalmSounds 2016 interview with Tim Cole for further background on how we settled on this term.

Having developed generative music technologies since 1990, we (Intermorphic) had known for a good long while that generative music played against an image seemed to elicit a deeper reflection on the image, unlocking thoughts and memories. So, way back in 2010 we settled on the term "Reflective Music" as a descriptor for the effect the output of a generative music system can have and then secured the reflectivemusic.com domain.

We were not quite there yet, however; a piece of the puzzle was still missing. For "system generated music" to be truly reflective we needed to find a way it could in some way be directly linked to or derived from something of meaning. That was a conundrum, as "generative music" or "inmo music" has randomness at its core!

What turned the corner for us was when in 2013 we realised we could turn text into melodic seed patterns using a technique we call TTM (Text-to-Music). Words carry meaning, can be included in a piece, and (with some extra developments we needed to do) could be used by our generative music engine as input from which to generate melodic seed patterns. The generated music thus has a link to a meaning that can be reflected upon for truly reflective music!

It turned out the combination of both Text-to-Music and Generative Music techniques worked really well because our generative music engine could weave a live generative background around these patterns, and, if required, even "wash them away" over time.

Wotja

With this final piece of the puzzle in place, in 2013 we set about developing the Wotja Generative Music System which continues to go from strength to strength.

There are just two of us and it seems there is an endless list of features and improvements we want to make to Wotja. Being our life's work you can therefore expect to see a lot more from Wotja in the years ahead!