Slashdot Mirror
What Math Actually Sounds Like
cellophane writes "If Verdi had a math fetish and a computer, would he be John Greschak? Greschak composes music based upon the mathematical properties of various mathematical objects (e.g. a six-sided die or pentominoes). He writes computer programs to realize devised algorithms and uses the results of these processes as source material for musical pieces. Greschak's newest addition, Platonic Dice: Dodecahedron for 12 woodwinds, was created by using musical material derived from the mathematical properties of one of the Platonic dice. Well, its not Verdi, but its definitely interesting."
... to see thousands of web-porn banners screaming "see Dodecahedrons in hot back-stage action now!!!"
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
It's not as good at the latest crazy town album, but in case it's slashdotted -- it sounds very strange, twangy, almost random, and VERY, VERY dissonant. However, it's quite beautiful.
Fractal Music is quite interesting, as well, and oddly it still sounds more orderly than Platonic Dice.
To be math sounds like "No! What do you mean it didn't check!" or "What do you mean, pi r squared?"
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I anticipate that Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti will spend the hereafter listening to this, if there is any sense of justice in the afterlife.
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
since music is based on math anyway, i don't see why it isn't possible to write a program to generate pleasing music... or at the very least, some basic music themes.
true, computers are a long way away from replacing humans, namely since sometimes the most interesting piece of music to the human ear isn't always the most mathematically pleasing.
-John
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
Julia sets would sound pretty cool I gather :)
Please hook up a sampler and record it that way.
I like the music, its just that the MIDI kills me.
This is truely one of the worst things i've ever heard. And I own a gravel album so thats saying quite a lot.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Listen to some Mozart. The man was a mathematical genius.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
http://www.greschak.com/m22mid.htm doesnt even sound that bad.
The poster was right - this is not Verdi. Music is not just an expression of mathematical equations. What these compositions are missing is the feeling, the tension, the journey that music should take you on. Serious music lovers like myself all would say that the best music is that which is filled with emotion. That includes classical music like Beethoven and Handel; it also (at least IMHO) includes newer music from bands like The Tea Party, Our Lady Peace, or my favourite indie band, Das Radio.
The true breakthrough will be when equations can be used to create music with emotion. Unfortunately, that will probably be years away...
Sounds like "for 12 monkeys with kazoos."
No, I take that back. It didn't sound that good.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Worst. Music. Ever.
nuc134r m4n
Music has mathmatical patters, that does not mean math makes good music. People have been trying to discover algorithims which can generate music for years, and this guy has not advanced the science any.
True enough. The only good overlap I've seen between mathematics and music has been the use of math to analyze music written by humans. For an example of such analysis, please refer to the landmark work by Meloon and Sprott.
Think about it - even the most mathematically simple bits of music (r'n'b background music, three-chord punk, etc) rely on the utterly random variations in the human voice to make them interesting. While you could concievably generate some interesting musical backdrops using computers, unless you're that type of person who spends a thousand notes on headphones you're not going to notice.
Still, it beats The Ketchup Song.
I haven't tried it yet, but a couple of days ago a message went out on guile-user saying that the Common Music composition language has been ported to GUILE. (It is a Lisp-based program that already worked with several varieties of Lisp; see the link for more info.)
It supports ordinary composition, but its toolbox supports stuff like random selection and interpolation into envelopes, which ought to make exploitation of the mathematical properties of objects pretty easy.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Music based on the mathematics of dice? Sounds like music to play D&D by.
I used to hear this every day in high school during band practice.... while everyone was warming up.
I wouldn't exactly call it music though...
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking. The musical system is, as it is, very heavily mathematical (resonance and harmonics etc)...
We are looking at this from the wrong way around, people should be looking for incredible mathematical leit-motives and patterns in already existing music such as Mozart or whatever...
All of these attempts to show that math is beautiful (or just attempts to make math an auditory experience) seem kind of ridiculous to me... kind of like if someone tried to make paintings using the vertex rendering methods used in Quake 1... sure it's a noble idea, but the hill to climb is in the other direction: to make vertex renderings that look like Van Gogh.
As for the music I heard on that page. It's 'curious'... nothing more. If you really want odd sounding yet beautiful harmonics, listen to some Joe Zawinul on piano...
sigh. all this, in IMHO (tm).
I would propose making monsterously huge speakers and blasting this into Iraq, but in my oppinion it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
This is truely one of the worst things i've ever heard
Is it just me or did that sound like something from the music 'conversation' in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? I mean, if the aliens were drugged-out at the time...
The truely wise man posts his music in MIDI before summiting his webpage to Slashdot.
In my opinion, the project holds great promise, but it certainly needs to be refined. I believe it would be possible to mathematically generate music that people would enjoy, but it requires a more in-depth knowledge of different scales, rhythms, the technicals of different musical styles, and other nuiances that would make a huge different in the listenability of the randomly generated works.
Though technically sound, the human mind is as capable of piecing it together as an English-speaker is able to understand Cantonese right out of the box. Not to say that he could not learn eventually, but would always be more suited to his native language.
And that's why we need to remember our audience when composing music!
It would be interesting if you could walk around the geometry in 3D,and have the music change as you walked around it like a geochord.
corporations do...
...the music of Arnold Schoenberg. He was a german composer in the early 20th century who wrote very atonal pieces using what he called "tone rows" - a particular note could not be used again until all of the other 11 notes in the chromatic scale had been used.
Didn't Douglas Adams come up with this idea? It was a program called Anthem, which turned a company's financials into music, rather than geometric shapes, but the idea's the same.
Politas
For those interested, check out the music by Iannis Xenakis. Architect by trade, he wrote music based on mathematical series, probability, and much, much more. Difficult to appreciate, certainly, but most 'classical' music is, regardless of tonality, harmony, or length. He even wrote a book, or several, about the processes and the background to his works. Definitely worth checking out, especially for the engineers amongst you. The maths is nearly mind-boggling.
One of the books can be found here.
I would propose making monsterously huge speakers and blasting this into Iraq, but in my oppinion it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention.
Actually, we've done stuff like that before
GMD
watch this
It seems that the best music seems to come from a seemingly random composition of chords. While it would be computationally infeasible to write an equation that describes the chords for an entire song, it would be possible to generate cellular automata, based on rules devised by Wolfram and other people, which closely resemble the music we like. Some rules described in A New Kind of Science, by Wolfram predict cell patterns which are seemingly random but yet repeat at some intervals of time. Such kind of rules could be, IMveryHO, used to produce some rather melodious music.
-- Reality is just an extended dream.
w.t.f.?
If you consider one possible criterion for a 'serious music lover' to be any person who spends a good portion of their income acquiring new music (eg, DJs), then I think you'd have to take into account a lot of different tastes, many of which don't attach too much importance to 'emotion', such as it is. Tension, sure, but emotion in the Beethoven mold, perhaps not.
Schoenberg tried the same sort of thing in 1921 or so. He invented the "twelve tone" system, in which the twelve chromatic tones were arranged according to mathematical sets. He even remarked to one of his students that he had come up with an idea that would, "ensure the domination of German music in the 20th century."
The basic idea was neat in that it removed conscious choice from the equation and resulted in melodic and harmonic combinations that wouldn't normally occur to a composer. Serialism, as it's called, is still being taught and used to this day, even if I find it tiresome myself. Basically, this is just another facet of that serial system.
It has a unique kind of icy, remote quality, but music isn't really meant to be appreciated on an intellectual level so much as an emotional one. True enough, you can have a satisfying balance of both (like Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier), but purely intellectual stuff like this just isn't all that interesting outside of certain circles. Schoenberg's students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern did a much better job of writing listenable music with the system, mostly because they allowed some human influence in the model.
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
If it sounds that bad, RIAA will use it to test-bed P2P and prove that it can't work ;)
have you been defaced today?
When the refresh rate of my monitor is too low and I set it back my body always does this strange shaking thing. Turning this music off does the same thing.
but its definitely interesting
...no, its really not.
Actually, there already is a shitload of math behind music. Douglas Hofstadter describes the intimate relation of math and music (and some other seemlingly unrelated things in his book Godel, Escher, Bach.
If Verdi had a math fetish
This gives a whole new meaning to "NP-hard"...
For another related site about creating weird sounds, check out the CAITLIN project...it creates music out of code. I wish I could get my hands on a copy of their code, it'd be interesting to see what happened when I ran my programs through it...
It sounds like the unholy scream of ultimate suffering. BTW, I'm a math major. Thinking of getting a minor in music.
Makes me think of this artist. Some of the MP3's are nice.
You are wrong! Nothing is based on math, we actually use math to explain something, not the other way around.
Former blues players in Mississipi didn't have a clue about math. And fractal was invented in order to study plants, and it's a well known fact that plants were around way before human being could count their 10 fingers.
...`cat pi.txt >> /dev/dsp`?
Am I the only one that finds catting random things to the sound device[s] amusing?
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
John Cage and Elliot Carter have been doing music from logical or random sequences and very math-like stuff since the 70's. (I claim no special personal knowledge; my wife was a cello performance major.) While this is interesting, it isn't totally new to music.
Boom Shanka
If you want to listen to math in a raw uninterpreted form, try mathematical proofs set to music on the Metamath Music Page.
or maybe it is, depending on just how artistically blind the /. reader population is. music based entirely on mathematics is nothing new, it's been relatively high-profile for the last hundred years. if you're going to give this guy lots of traffic from a slashdot post, the same thing should be done for all of the other computer music, algorithmic, and math-based composers out there. there are LOTS, and most of them are thousands of times more original than this guy.
Non-musical types have been playing and producing mathematical music since Plato. I can't say any of it ranks up there with "twinkle twinkle" (even). But it never hurts to try...
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
boybands in hell, a lot more of us would give our lives to Christ.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
That sounded like a bunch of junior high kids warming up for band practice. I should know... I was one of those kids. =)
...oOOo..'(_)'..oOOo...
"CPU Bach," for the 3DO, created by Sid Meier. Don't feel bad, it was almost immediately forgotten, which is a real shame. It was a bold (and pretty successful) experiment.
The interesting part figuring out how the math lines up with the music. I don't see any source code, not that I have time to read it anyways. :)
Dear God that was some of the worst music I've ever heard. Making music derived from math is great, but couldn't it at least have a catchy tune instead of sounding like random noise?
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
Granted, no one is writing about my music anywhere :-]
It must be great but I don't know because no matter many updates I install there's always one more for anything that needs to be played.
Ever.
Really - dozens and dozens of QT updates and it's never enough. What's the fucking point?
Is this guy some kind of D&D freak or what?
OK, little tiny bits of it sound like the soundtrack of the movie Tron, and the person that wrote Tron's music was definitely a genius, but I'm listening to Platonic Dice right now and it REALLY IS rather awful. Not very "musical" at all.
This is not completely relevant, but people here might be interested in the converse question: What does music look like when viewed as a sequential, mathematical structure. This guy has analyzed a number of musical pieces and shows their structure. He also shows what sequential data look like.
We've been over this before, it's MATHS not MATH!
Oh, and RIAA ownz all your equations.
laterZ.
Feelings...
The problem with AI is simply not being able to create patterns / identify patterns / modify patterns. True, AI can do pattern matching, but not to the level of a musical composer.
Humans have already reached a limit to the classical rules of music, which is partly responsible for the contemprary period in music history, but a computer can still only attempt to play chess, which is infinitly easier than composing great music, and not even attempt to play other games like go...
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
...some prodigal math genius at Wal-Mart the other day, because he appeared to be no more than 6 years old, yet he was playing the EXACT same song on a Kawasaki synthesizer.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of this score... modern-day medieval torture chamber music.
John Greschak probably should do a bit more research on the subject of "Platonic Dice". What he is referring to are the Platonic solids.
In order for a solid to be a Platonic solid, it needs to be convex and have all its vertices (corners) to have the same number and size of regular polyhedrons touching them. For example, a cube is a Platonic solid because all of the vertices have 4 of the same size squares touching. There are only 5 Platonic solids possible: the Tetrahedron (4 sides), the Hexahedron (cube, 6 sides), Octahedron (8 sides), Dodecahedron (12 sides), Icosahedron (20 sides).
There is also a class of related solids called Archimedian solids where the solids are convex, all vertices are identical, all faces are regular polygons, but not all of the faces are identical to each other.
Sapere aude!
I think sometimes people have made decisions about the role of art in their lives without ever having really thought about it.
John Cage believed the role of art is to keep people from drowning in their own thoughts. He believed the role of the artist is to open people's eyes, ears, and minds to the beauty that surrounds them all the time.
Emotion is just one facet of art. There is a whole spectrum. When Cage went to determine why some things are not beautiful, he could not come up with a reason.
"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." --Cage
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
You would already know what math sounds like
Teacher: Class, today we're going to have a pop quiz
Students: Groaaannn, whiinne, snifffle
Depends on the audience though, a room full of geeks with a math fetish would probably make much more disturbing "music"...
Disclaimer: I like math, but it's not a fetish - phorm
Math, at least in my highschool, sounds like a bunch of snoring sleeping kids with their heads on the desk.
rm -rf sig
my ass makes more pleasant sounds than that.
Does this remind anyone else about the previous slashdot story about synesthasia? (The music is pointy!)
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
People have been writing math-based music since the '20s. In the '50s, it was probably the *most* common form of music written in conservatories -- the Romantic style was considered somewhat atavistic. Thank God those days are gone.
It's called serialism. See Schoenberg, Berio and Boulez.
--Tom, who strangely has a B. Mus. in composition.
Tom Geller
A fascinating little shareware program can be found at THIS website. Musoft Builders are a bunch of neat people. The program is called "A Musical Generator", and outputs .MIDI files based on fractals, .BMP files, sinal waves, text, you name it... I used to tinker with it and got surprisingly musical results at times - not exactly anything as good as Varese, but much more enjoyable than John Tesh. I highly advise people to check them out!
PS - I'm not affiliated with the dudes, the program, or the company in any way besides being a satisfied customer.
His name was Dirk Gently, and the book is much better than any of the Hitchhiker's Guides
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I'm fuck'n tired.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
...Is finally a reality!
Anthem for everybody!
Now all we need are Electric Monks to do the discussion and believing for us!
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
He was incredibly an early influence on Frank Zappa.
I'm not a music student, just an educated listener. Maybe someone better versed in 20th century music than I am can comment on the relevance of Varese to mathmatically-inspired music.
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
There's a really great essay written by a famous 20th Century Mathmetician / Composer named Milton Babbit, called Who Cares if you listen?[palestrant.com]. Interesting reading if you have a chance.
I'm an undergrad music major, and seeing the comments on this board makes me cringe a little. Most of the "good music" that people mention are either a) written by 100-300 year old DWMs (Dead White Males) or b) 4-chord flashes-in-the pans.
I will admit, the music in question doesn't necessarily sound "pretty" or "pleasant," but its all about stretching the boundaries of sound. In Beethoven's day, people were aghast that he used such "shocking dissonances" in his pieces, but now we hold him as one of the most emotional and pleasing composers to listen to. Same with just about every other famous composer: the reason they became famous wasn't because the were doing the same stuff everybody else was doing! They stretched the boundaries, looked for new ideas, new ways of composing, etc.
Those who like their 4-chord bands and DWM's can go on listening to them, while the real musicians continue to advance the serious study of music. Don't say the music is crap just because you don't have enough intellectual power to understand it.
This music is plain ugly. It's uglier than what Arnold Schoenberg created.
Those that believe otehrwise will be condemned to listen it for three hours (without interruptions).
..where they came up with the music for Tron.
Music is based on math in about the same sense that great poems are based on typewriters. Well, it might not be that extreme, but there's much more to music than math. There is a lot of math in the form that music needs to work within, but that's not what the music is about.
On the other hand, great poems based on typewriters are fair game. Look at e.e. cummings. (Jumping outside the rules can be a way of expressing creativity too! Just as long as you don't do it because someone told you it was really cool and experimental and avante garde and stuff.)
So, while my knee-jerk reaction was to rant about how stupid an idea dodecahedron-based music is, perhaps it's a musical way for this guy to express how much he loves math. And that's cool, maybe, but it's not my taste exactly.
I really thought it sounded more like "bla, bla, bla..." I guess it was my professors the ones to blame...
If Verdi had a math fetish and a computer, would he be John Greschak?
:)
I don't know if he would sound like Greschak, but he would definitely sound a bit like like Aphex Twin.
Rather modern, yes, but coming from a university with a famous music department (York, United Kingdom) I must say that a *lot* of students here are not up to that standard in their composition.
A lot of musical 'styles' are expressible in standard formulae anyway, so I was told by a former music student, so using pure mathematical properties for the composition is not actually a very far-fetched idea.
Hmm, to think about it, in the Royal School of Music theory examinations I took when I was small, there was always that bonus question at the end for identifying the composer of a given part of music...
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Because by the time the professor gets to the QED we are all peacefully snoring on the table.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Those who can do, those who can't try to be interesting. Terrible, just terrible.
I think the basic answer to "If Verdi had ...would he be John Greschak?" is a resounding "No". Verdi wrote pieces people wanted to listen because they were musical, rather than being a mathematical curiosity. Of course there's lots of maths in music - the trick is working out which bits sound good, rather than look good when explained on a resume / arts application grant :)
...the computer will begin to make a hideous noise.
[click]
Aha! I was right!
What is the point of trying to find out what a cube or a set of dominoes or whatever 'sounds like'?
I can tell you right now, that if you try to find out what a chess board sounds like, you will find that it sounds bloody awful! The same goes for almost all other geometric models or mathematical sequences.
Sure, look to maths for your inspiration; mess about with different equations and sequences until you find one that sounds interesting (supposing you aren't bothered by such pedestrian concepts as music that is pleasing to the ear). For instance, take a look at Aphex Twin's album 'windowlicker' through a scrolling spectrum analyser. There are some deliberately geometric shapes in there, and while they don't exactly sound great, they don't sound out of place in the music.
Don't, however, assume that because something can be done that there is a benefit in doing it.
All things in moderation; including moderation
Simon and Garfunkel -- that's very keen, man. [toke] And it makes me wonder. Subway walls, tenement halls... which one does Slashdot resemble more? Well, some days, when the grits are a-pouring and the goatse.cx trolls roaring, I think it's more like bathroom stalls. That's probably how it gets the page views that keep it in business, too; I mean, who wouldn't want to read a continually updated bathroom stall door?
An Irish/Scottish jig and reel generator.
The music isn't based on any kind of mathematical technique, and it's all the better for it.
Folks, I love mathematics and music but they should not be put together like this. The mathematical models to produce music that sounds good (Bach, Mozart, Brahms etc...) would be far more complex than Platonic Dice. You may as well be throwing random notes down on paper, oh wait that's what this is. I'm sorry this is the music equivalent of the guy covering himself in paint and jumping or rolling on the canvas. Sure, someone might like it, but it's still crap.
Screw realty just hook me up another monitor!
Check this out. Brian Evans has done some interesting things: Created a Fractal Graphic and Music from the same function, Created visual art by modeling well kown music mathmatically, etc. http://www.lightspace.com/
I've done something similar for a computer music programming course. We had to come up with a creative final project, and at the time, I was working on a fueling model for General Atomics. So I basically plugged in some simplified data from that program into another one that would output graphics and sound based on the data. What I forgot to take into account is that my GA program ran on awesome computers optimized for those type of calculations, and my music software was running on a G4 (now... I know that's *technically* a supercomputer... but). In any case, it really sucked.
So, I turned the particle count down by a few orders of magnitude until I think there was a maximum of about a dozen at any time... tweaked the reaction data to scale for that, and in the end, I actually had a really cool audio/visual model of what a deuterium atom sees as it goes from the wall of a fusion reactor to the core. In an added bonus, it even sounded interesting.
I think the most fun I had in that project was designing the frequency mixtures that would accompany the various things happening in the program.
One of the guys in Douglas Adams' book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is working on software that does this - life immitating art ;)
- doctea
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dumbass.
Next thing you know we'll have RIAA coming after the casinos for gamblers rolling dice.
Whether or not he was a mathematical genius remains to be seen, but his music has regular swells every thirty seconds, which [apparently] has been proven to temporarily increase the iq of listeners. Mozart makes you smart :)
btw Philip Glass came out on the bottom of that study.
This sentence no verb
this may be interesting for the (rare?) molecular biologists who visit /.
r /music. html
i heard once about a guy who had made software to represent protein sequences in a "musical" way. one could find sequence similarities by listening to the "music" produced by different proteins, to presumably find proteins that share common properties.
more info at this site:
http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/wli/dna_cor
For future reference, MIDI is a protocol (and an interface specification.)
It can't sound good, bad, or like anything at all. It's like saying "I these crappy TCP/IP sounds" when listening to streaming MP3's.
I guess what you meant is "General MIDI" which defines some "standard" instrument sets, which for the most part are executed rather poorly on consumer soundcards.
This "music" is CRAP. It's not surprising that non-musical features of some fucking polygon sound like non-music.
I'm going to make my cat stare at the screen ala Clockwork Orange while I scroll the slashdot.com homepage, then I'm going to walk her over a keyboard and record it. Then I'm sending in MY amazing musuck article. It's MY turn.
Man, I think I am your neighbor. I thought about coming over one night with some cds. If I have to listen to your stereo, I should get some say in what you're playing.
The Carnatic Music of South India is a scientific system based on 72 "Melakartha" Ragas and 1000s of their offspring "Janya" Ragas as well as combinations of these.Centuries before computrs were thought of Mathematics has been applied to Music.
ksmanyan
I'm sorry, but by far the most beautiful music I know (works by Brahms, Bach, Schubert, Beethoven etc.) has no vocal part. And one could argue that the best singers are those with the fewest "random twitches" in their voice, affecting things such as vibrato, fullness and sustained harmonics...
If you can sing the "Wohltemperiertes Klavier", though...
His Tower of Hanoi thingy sounds better.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor