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An Experiment in A New Kind of Music
waynegoode writes "Stephen Wolfram's Wolfram Research has produced an new application:
WolframTones-- 'An Experiment in A New Kind of Music'. It combines the principles in Stephen's book, 'A New Kind of Science' and Mathematica to 'instantly create unique music' in many different styles. They describe it as pretty neat as well as being scientifically interesting, and useful. After listening to some compositions and creating a few random ones myself, I must agree that it is. And anyone who has listen to the radio the last few years could certainly use some unique music."
Scary, scary idea. A paraphrase from it: 'Composition was once a sort of trance where slightly insane people wrote music down feverishly. Our way, based on mathematics, is much better. Regular, based on curves and graphs.'
These sound like video game stage music. Maybe it's just the MIDI. But I don't know; I could envision an RPG or Megaman or fighting game to every tone it generated. Maybe someone's job just got a lot easier.
That's the shit that feds me up
I listened to the first few and, at best, they sound like something you'd skip over on a CZ101. Perhaps I should read the hype before commenting but elevator-electronic music has been around since ... [insert Moog (RIP) ref here].
Without anything approaching Steve Reich or any of the techno programmers of the last 20 or so years I don't see why this is interesting. They already have computers that can write music (see: Babyface)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
On pages 7-10:
Physics: "In the future of physics the greatest triumph would undoubtedly be to find a truly fundamental theory for our whole universe. Yet despite occasional optimism, traditional approaches do not make this seem close at hand. But with the methods and intuition I develop in this book there is I believe finally a serious possibility that such a theory can actually be found."
Social Sciences: "...I suspect that one will often have a much better chance of capturing fundamental mechanisms for phenomena in the social sciences by using instead the new kind of science that I develop in this book based on simple programs."
Computer Science: "One consequence [of this book's material] is a dramatic broadening of the domain to which computational ideas can be applied--in particular to include all sorts of fundamental questions about nature and about mathematics."
Philosophy: "But my discoveries in this book lead to radically new intuition. And with this intuition it turns out that one can for the first time began to see resolutions to many longstanding issues..."
There's plenty more where this came from.
When it comes down to it, this is a way of interpretting a psuedeo random series of dots in a grid. Saying it's a "new kind of music" is a bit misleading - There's no flow, no beginning, no middle, no end. It's a new way of randomly generating midi note events within certain constraints.
I think it was "Instant Music" from Electronic arts, but I can't be sure. I'd have to go into my attic to find the disk... and the Amiga.
Ok, the algorithm might me more sophisticated to generate something less apparently random noise, but I wouldn't rush out to buy the "music" it generates.
From "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" By "Douglas Adams" (Talking About a Financial
spreadsheet program for the Mac) :
'You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be expressed as a sequence or pattern of numbers,'
enthused Richard. 'Numbers can express the pitch of notes, the length of notes, patterns of pitches and
lengths.'
'You mean tunes,' said Reg. The carrot had not moved yet.
Richard grinned.
'Tunes would be a very good word for it. I must remember that.'
'It would help you speak more easily.' Reg returned the carrot to his plate, untasted. 'And this
software did well, then?' he asked.
'Not so much here. The yearly accounts of most British companies emerged sounding like the Dead
March from Saul, but in Japan they went for it like a pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery company
anthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you'd probably say that they tended to get a
bit loud and squeaky at the end. Did spectacular business in the States, which was the main thing,
commercially. Though the thing that's interesting me most now is what happens if you leave the accounts
out of it. Turn the numbers that represent the way a swallow's wings beat directly into music. What
would you hear? Not the sound of cash registers, according to Gordon.'
To bypass all the javascript and all other shit:
In Firefox:
1. Go to Tools.
2. Page Info.
3. Media.
4. Click on the link whose type is "Embed"
5. Click "Save As..."
You can then use iTunes or a program of your choice to change it to another format. Enjoy.
All your Sybase are belong to us.