Slashdot Mirror
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.
I'm going back to the radio. I can just fire up an old Nintendo to get this kind of "music"
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.
Checkmate.
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."