haha, that's so random - some thoughts on chance and music

Published in Schwarm #5, Student Journal for Art and Theory, HfG Karlsruhe, 2026.
Member of the editorial team
ISSN 2942-2531

“haha, that’s so random” – this quintessentially millennial phrase seems to have emerged in late 20th-century colloquial English (its first documented use was in an MIT student newspaper in 1971), but gained widespread traction in the 2000s. Randomness here is a deviation from the status quo, noise in an otherwise ordered signal. It teeters on the edge of indifference and malaise, a shrug toward incoherence, the delight of the unexpected punctuated by an apprehension towards the unknown.

Yet the story of randomness reaches further back than the turn of the millennium. The word random entered English after the Norman conquest, derived from the Old French randon, denoting speed, haste, impetuous force. It evoked motion without restraint, a gallop, an unshackled and forceful trajectory. Only in the late nineteenth century did randomness acquire its modern scientific meaning: an event without pattern, governed by probability distributions rather than purpose.

In the vertiginous speed of the computational age, randomness and probability have gained new currency; predictive statistical models are heralded as the spinning jenny of cognitive, creative and, subsequently, all labour. In sifting through seemingly random hallucinations, what can randomness reveal about the unexpected ways it challenges intentionality, irrationality, and determinacy?

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