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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.
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.'
More unique (and irritating) ringtones!
Copernicus debunked: The universe actually revolves around Stephen Wolfram's ass.
Kraftwerk is gonna be pissed.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
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 **
This is crap, not music. I could make better music by repeatedly smashing your face into a piano.
A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about
whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they
got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor said, "The
medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was made from Adam's
rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible surgical feat."
The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the Garden
itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that the Garden
and the world were created. So God must have been an architect."
The computer scientist, who'd listened carefully to all of this, then
commented, "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?"
I'm going back to the radio. I can just fire up an old Nintendo to get this kind of "music"
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.
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.
Agreed, windows ships with such a lousy synth and samples it's near impossible for midi files to sound anything like music. There are pleanty of freely available samples (ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/awe32/soundfonts/8Re alGS20.zip - should help considerably) and you can find something that will improve the experience considerably.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Yeah, thats right, I'm creating a bot to click every button, and taking each output, emailing it to myself, and copyrighting it.
I figure in a year or so I should have just about everything either copywritten, or at least something close enough I can sue everyone.
I'm also working at buying the rights to the word "stealth".
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Checkmate.
I haven't touched one in years, and I still catch myself humming the most random Nintendo tunes.
I don't know which is worse - still being able to hum the tune during the "Game Over" screen from Super Mario Brothers 2, or still knowing that the tune is from SMB2.
Someone needs to invent a miracle pill that clears all this garbage out of our brains, so we can work on a cure for cancer or something else important with the newly-freed space.
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."
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
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Well, isn't that appropriate for a music application?