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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.
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
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
The truely wise man posts his music in MIDI before summiting his webpage to Slashdot.
No, it's not.
Britney.
...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
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.
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
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.
...`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
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?
> For another related site about creating weird sounds, check out the CAITLIN project [unn.ac.uk]...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...
My "Hello, world!" blew up, but I'm still famous for my "Concerto in C# for two strings and a segfault".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Granted, no one is writing about my music anywhere :-]
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.
...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.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
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!
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
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
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
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"
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.
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...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