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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."
I wouldn't trust anything Wolfram says about his creations. He has a tendency to toot his own horn. Constantly. If you've read A New Kind of Science you know exactly what I'm getting at.
I have to second this opinions. I couldn't find any sort of reference or acknowledgement to previous work on the subject.
Of course, I have a slight bias on the topic as my supervisor did something similar back in 1986.
(P. Prusinkiewicz, Score Generation with L-Systems, International Computer
Music Conference 86 Proceedings, 1986, pp. 455-457.)
** Sig-a-licious **
ANKOS would be pretty good with just a few changes:
Reduce page count from 1200 to 400 by removing redundant and self aggrandizing material.
Retract claims that Wolfram is singlehandedly going to change the course of human history.
Choose a title more suitable to the seriousness of the book. Perhaps "An Introduction to Cellular Automata" or "Fun With Graph Paper"
Judging by the "How WolframTones Works" page...
I saw a paper on exactly this a few years ago (perhaps written by these people?). I was particuarly disappointed in the uncreative approach to attaching it to music. Completely one-dimensional, based on a single pattern rule, using the results as a simple piano roll. In this particular example, it seems the programmer has inserted a few generic style and rhythm rules as well. Cute.
If the computation could generate anything more than a bunch of undirected pitches, I might be impressed. Perhaps have variables that can trigger harmonic shifts, considerations of form, independent patterns, definitions of rules for the next 10 seconds for an evolving pattern... SOMETHING more innovative than using it as a piano roll.
It's also disappointing that the score just takes a snippet of the whole pattern and truncates the rest. Some border rule treatment could have added to it.
Hopefully, this will be only the beginning of a much more interesting project. If this is the final result, my fascination has ended.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Sounds like something coming from a person who has never created music. It's actually a craft, and needs a certain competence. And even the ancient Greeks knew there was a relation between mathematics and music.