- Experimental, avant-garde, noise — how are these three different?
- They answer to method, stance and material respectively. Experimental is method first: define a process and accept an uncontrolled result. Avant-garde is stance first: break the form, notation and performance conventions of an inherited tradition, usually in work that is still composed. Noise is material first: broadband saturation, distortion and feedback used directly as the musical substance. A piece can qualify as all three, but for prompting, pick the one closest to your intent.
- What belongs in the prompt?
- Process, not mood. "Prepared piano, screws between the strings, sparse strikes, long silences" gets you much further than "weird music," and "tape loop degrading, losing more high end on every pass" is far more precise than "retro experimental." Give a sound source, a treatment and a time scale, and the model has something it can actually execute.
- Everything comes back sounding like ordinary electronic music.
- That usually means the prompt left too many musical defaults in place. Add the exclusions — "no rhythmic grid, no chord progression, no melody, no repeated sections" — and specify unconventional sources such as contact-mic'd vibration, metal objects or feedback. Then ask for long stretches of silence. Silence is structural here, and adding it changes the result immediately.
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