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Music Based on Fibonacci Sequence and Stock Market
Gary Franczyk writes "A band named Emerald Suspension has made an album named Playing the Market that is, as they put it: "structured based on patterns created by the stock market, economic indicators, algorithms". They have some songs based off of the Fibonacci sequence, the misery and consumer confidence indices, and the national debt. "
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
1. Mathematics is the language of nature.
2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge.
Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature
The first one sounds kind of like Pyramid Song by radiohead, but really this data doesn't make great music. You can make disjointed noise easily enough, and I'd guess no-one has any pressing need to listen to the stock market.
Maybe Philip Glass could make a symphony out of this stuff, but these guys unfortunately can't (from the samples). It isn't musical enough to not be background noise.
Experimental: yes, music: no.
Interesting idea, though. I think this could make a great backing noise to a Godspeed You Black Emperor! song or something.
It was clearly stated as being based on various patterns. As such it is anything but random. Could people please stop moderating based on opinions and start looking a little more objectively? A fallacy isn't insightful by any means.
"Zero one one, two three five eight./Thir-teen t-wenty one..."
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
the song Lateralus by Tool is based on the Fibonacci Sequence
there's even been discoveries of the whole album Lateralus having some type of relationship with the sequence
One, One, Two, Three, Five, Eight, Thirteen, Twenty-One... Mathematics is the language of nature
THe drum line in Lateralus is a fibonacci sequence. Some folks thought that it was a clue that you should listen to the album in a different order.
http://www.bofe.org/overthinking.htm
While I have no idea if this is valid or not (the band has been quiet), I do listen to the album in that order. It's actually a better album, I believe, in that sequence.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
This was already done a long time ago:
This is a bit like reality TV. No planning involved, just get some equipment and see what happens automatically. The result is something that consumers will consume, but it isn't high in quality, just cheap to produce.
I want television shows with scripts and plots.
I want music that has been carefully composed and made to sound good.
But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well. Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate world went bananas over it." Reg regarded him solemnly from over a piece of carrot poised delicately on his fork in front of him, but did not interrupt. "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." Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective agency. :-D
Back in 1991 Fiorella Tirenzi created music based on radio astronomy data. I'm betting she's easier to look at than the folks who produced the stock market music.
Throughout the ages many composers (J.S. Bach/Schubert/Bartok), have used the fibonacci numbers in their works: http://www.mcs.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/R.Knott/Fibon acci/fibInArt.html#music
Many contemporary composers like Ligeti and Chowning use mathmatical formulas like the fibonacci number as well.
So, how is this news... most students in music are supposed to have remembered this from their classes ;)
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If you studied music seriously you would know Bach used Fibonacci in many of his pieces. Most notable the Well Tempered Clavier, Composers have been using it for hundred of years.
Should we be pleased or worried that ideas from the twisted mind of Douglas Adams are coming true? He predicted something akin to this in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
Is it anything like the pi song? Threeeee point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three...
Ummm, It is sunday afternoon and you manage a first post on slashdot....
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
Fibonacci relations abound in art and music. This is nothing new. A text that discusses this in some length with regards to the famous Hungarian composer Bela Bartok is Erno Lendvai's Bela Bartok: An Analysis of His Music. Lendvai makes a very compelling case even though Bartok never explicitly stated on record his use of such devices. It should be noted that Bartok was a pantheist so that might explain some of his desire to use patterns in nature.
Algorithmic composition has been around for quite some time but really took off with the advent of "computer music". Different motivations exist for algorithmic composition but they are interesting. Unfortunately, these motivations are often more interesting than the resultant music IMO. A good environment to quickly do algorithmic composition in is the Common Lisp/Common Music environment as a front end to Csound.
Stochastic composition was invented by Iannis Xenakis. He used probabilistic densitiesm modeled after physical phenomena such as diffusion of gases to compose some of his works. His rather difficult to digest text Formalized Music discusses his methods.
John Cage pioneered aleatoric composition in which he used chance to make compositional choices. It was largely a reaction to the fact that so-called integral serialism, a highly deterministic system of total control, yielded works that were so difficult for most people to comprehend that they essentially sounded random.
The band discussed here really isn't doing anything new. If they do it extremely well though, then more power to them but I leave that judgement up to the individual listener.