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."

Comments

Metamath music

[ortholattice]

Another thing to look at is Metamath music, which is interesting in a different way. It is the raw, unadorned piano music generated directly by mathematical proofs, very faithful to the actual mathematics.

Re:this is hardly 'new'

[nagora]

how would you describe "music" then?

Music is not something that can be defined in language. That is the trick that Cage pulled with this so-called piece. By drawing foolish critics into trying to say why it wasn't music he was able to side-step them because it can't be done in language. When they failed to define music, or why his childish prank was not music, his supporters then proclaimed that it must therefore be music, handily ignoring the fact that they would be unable to meet the same challenge and define why it was (other than resorting to "because a musician we like said it was").

It's rather like asking someone to define colour and when they fail, as they must, say that therefore "teapot" is a valid colour, indeed that the boundaries of colour have been pushed back by their bold assertion that "teapot" is in fact a valid colour.

If asked why teapot is not a colour, my answer is "don't be a fuckwit", not a deep discussion of wavelengths and cones, or somesuch, just as when asked if Cage's 4'33" (or whatever it was called) is music my answer is "don't be a twat" rather than a deep discussion of wavelenghs, tone, and harmony.

Put another way: I can show you some music and I can show you some things which are not music, but I can not hope, within the limitations of language, to ever capture the subtlties of the subject in an iron-clad and legalistic definition. Asking me to simply shows the bankruptcy of your philosophy and reveals it to be based on nothing more than the sort of semantic buffoonary characteristic of minds which stopped developing around the time their owners' first zits arrived.

TWW