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Mathematically Pattern-Free Music
gary.flake writes "'Scott Rickard set out to do what no musician has ever tried — to make the world's ugliest piece of music [video]. At TEDxMIA, he discusses the math and science behind creating a piece of music devoid of any pattern.' He used mathematics of Évariste Galois (who was born 200 years ago) to create pattern-free sonar pings which he mapped to notes on a piano, and then played them using the non-rhythm of a Golomb Ruler. Now, why didn't I think of that..."
That's nothing- rap musicians have been doing this for decades.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Now this sheds a new light on the term "math rock".
Christopher Pecoraro - Irventu.com
I think the performer made a mistake at 9:13
......"set out to do what no musician has ever tried — to make the world's ugliest piece of music"...... Already done... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(You're)_Having_My_Baby
you won't attract the worm. Another piece of ugly music, Aphex Twin's Ventolin
2. Add Vogon poetry as lyrics. 3. Profit
I knew a guy in college that enjoyed making techno music with no loops. This takes the cake.
The consensus was that "Friday" already held that title.
I have heard many pattern free music compositions. I could hear the same pattern here.
Just hook up a random number generator to a set of speakers. Let the frequency and the duration of the "notes" be determined randomly. Use random numbers outside of the audible range to determine the space between notes. And voila! Completely random non-mathematical music.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
they kinda did it before this guy (at least from a rhythmic perspective), as a protest against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 here in the UK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_EP
Wouldn't a random number generate work just as well?
Seems a bit pretentious to call it "The World's Ugliest Piece of Music". Could have used a non-traditional instrument or at least detune the piano...or just have a computer just shoot out the sound itself.
Old hat. To discover the life of a musician who made randomization a career, see John Cage.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Well, I use the mathematics of Frank Plumpton Ramsey and Bartel Leendert van der Waerden (who were born about 100 years ago) to call bullshit on this claim: There is no sequence of anything (including musical notes) which is pattern free.
cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Waerden%27s_theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem
Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima is the most horrible "music" I've ever heard. (Intentionally so - Penderecki made it as dissonant and a-tonal and possible)
Don't believe me? Listen to it here
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
There were a few overlapping notes from pedal suspension that created chords. Although they tried to make ugly pattern-free music, they just ended up making modern music.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Interestingly enough, when you listen to such a piece, you hear a pattern of alternating low octaves notes and high octaves notes. Even though there is no mathematical repetition, I couldn't help anticipating the next big octave jump in a direction or the other, and the music had some kind of pattern to me. How weird that we can find meaning and feel sentiment in the most mathematically pattern-less piece of music?
Opening three notes of the Godfather Theme ("Speak Softly Love") at 8:53.
I really didn't think it was all that horrible. I was not ready to jump up and start dancing to it but I feel lot of the shit that gets played on the radio is worse. Due to the arrhythmic and random nature of the piece I bet it was actually a bitch to play on the piano.
This kills off any kabbalist's notion of the importance of numbers as such. Now music have no pattern, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOMIl3WjXc0
Something must be wrong with me, because I loved this piece immensely and would really like more. Hearing it again and thus repeating it seems to destroy the beauty of it.
The music starts at 7:40 if you prefer to just listen to the plinking of unmemorable notes...
But if it's math... can it be copyrighted?
I thought Nicleback had been doing this for years already.
it's Pachelbel Canon in D not Beethoven's 5th
Actually, as was explained in detail in the video, random is easy. Completely devoid of repetition is vastly more difficult. This was not simply random, this was mathematically non-repetitive. Using random numbers outside of the audible range would not necessarily preclude repetition, and using random frequencies is atonal sound, not tonal non-repetitive "music" as was the intention of the piece.
Completely random is trivial. Mathematically-sound aperiodic and repetition-free is a completely different kettle o' fish.
Note that the composition used the 88-tone chromatic scale of the standard piano keyboard. Without that constraint, you could make a much longer atonal composition, of course, but the point of the exercise was to use discrete mathematics and music to create a tonal composition completely devoid of repetition.
It would help if there were some definitions for "random" and "pattern-free" in this context. I find it annoying that he several times says that random music is not pattern-free.
It is true that their definitions are not equivalent, but it seems that he is implying that you cannot generate "pattern-free" music using randomly played notes, and that -depending of the definition of "pattern-free" of course- seems very, very unlikely.
Still, I can appreciate the effort to maximize information entropy, and the divulgation of discrete math.
That music isn't ugly. It does happen to be optimally dissonant, but ugly and dissonance are not the same thing. Related - but not same thing.
If you want some truly ugly music I recommend you get to YouTube and check out The Residents. They work hard to bring you the ugly.
Here is an example. It is the Residents covering the Rolling Stones Satisfaction. FAR more ugly than this mathematical oddity. You'll note that it is fairly repetitive and still PLENTY ugly.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
How does it compare to Revolution no. 9.
Primes have no patterns, so why not just map sounds/beats to prime numbers?
It's so cute when the kids think they've discovered something nobody's tried before (eyeballs roll up in head). Welcome to the 20th century!
Bastard Noise: The Analysis of Self-Destruction is the worst voluntary atonal arrhythmic non-patterned music ever.
If you don't consider suicide during a listening session, you are deaf!
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Nothing wrong with you at all.
Music evolved as a tool for learning. Rhythmic behaviour around the campfire teaching others how to hunt and all that.
Anything which our brain perceives as innovative in comparison to what we know is considered a new concept, and learning new concepts gives us pleasure (knowing more concepts is a survival trait).
So you get pleasure not from the repetition of patterns in Beethoven's Fifth, but from the interplay and differences. The pattern is set up initially, and then it's how the subsequent patterns are *different* from the initial setup that causes us to learn the much more complex rules which specify the variations. It's the learning that we perceive as pleasurable.
Patternless music is completely different from anything you've encountered. It's not surprising that it gives some people pleasure - the brain is wired to notice and process uniqueness and encode it via differences, and give pleasure in doing so.
I liked the music myself (a lot), and noticed some similarity to the works of Ginastera; specifically, "Concerto for piano and orchestra" which I also like.
I thought it was interesting when Tool designed their lyrics for Lateralus to the Fibonacci Sequence. While I don't think this had any weight of the harmony of the song and why it's such a powerful song, I think it added a level of complexity that I greatly enjoy in their songs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralus_(song)
John Cage's music employed chance, not randomness. I posted about him back in 2007 (search for my username, my post is near the top.)
Xenakis would be a better example of a composer who used randomness in a truly stochastic sense. However, he used it in a very deliberate and purposeful way, to shape only some elements of a composition, not the entire work. In contrast, Cage used chance as a way of abdicating control, although (like Xenakis' use of randomess) he employed it for only some elements of a work.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
So if I understand this correctly, since 3 and 88 are relatively prime, then every number in the closed field F88 is a multiple of 3, and if you keep multiplying by 3, you'll eventually hit each number.
But that's a pattern, isn't it?
it still sounds better than Skrillex...
So...this guy is trying to recreate white noise, then? I'm pretty sure there's an app for that...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Have gnu, will travel.
And yet you keep listening to it? Why? Ever tried some Merzbow? Mmm, tasty!
Long story short: "We used this very simple pattern to make music without patterns."
http://soundandcolor.com/ I have been applying RNGs to create random values for midi notes, based on shifting probabilities.
It is, after all, still better than most of what is sold as "music" these days.
Now get off my lawn...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
...and put on some Rush. :-)
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I think "emotionless" would have been a better description of the goal of the exercise, since "ugly" can invoke emotion, even if unpleasant, in any kind of music.
I found the music interesting and somewhat emotional, and thought it would make a nice sparse soundtrack piece. Sounds similar to serial music, related to Schoenberg who he mentioned. I'm only slightly familiar with this music, but it reminds me of some pieces by Babbitt. Here's a sample: http://www.npr.org/2006/05/10/5396502/a-difficult-composer-milton-babbitt-at-90. Definitely not ugly. If you're going to compare this "perfect sonar ping" to music at all, it seems like it might be worth doing a more serious comparison to previous composers who worked towards a similar goal.
Sounds like the new Lou Reed/Metallica album
Mod me noob if I am, but isn't it impossible to create music that doesn't follow a mathematical pattern that can be used to describe it?
No really, let's say we make Pi into music, you can say that it doesn't follow a set pattern since as far as we know it doesn't repeat, but can't we describe it mathematically?
Am I just not getting it?
Personally, I prefer V/VM, the track "Hard drive crash" in particular.
To the under 25s: This is what kids will be listening to when you're middle-aged. Enjoy. :)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I'd just play one long note. There'd be no pattern at all when there's only one note.
I shudder at the thought of what happens when the noisegrind community discovers this research.
there are so many problems in the world that require some brain power.
why do people put effort into "problems" which have no real value once answered?
I am going to prove the million monkey/million typewriter premise by taking some huge liberties with the original problem statement then make it seem like it was important. It was done ?! The million monkeys produced all the works of shakespeare? Well, I will just produce an array of numbers with an unusual set of spacing between their cardinal values and then play musical notes tied to those numbers. It was done? And presented to a TED audience? Was the frequency of the various note altered in a unique way ? Good - then that is what I will devote all my time to researching. Cancer ? There are too many people publishing findings in that field.
Whenever some hardcore relativists speaks about all music being equally good, I just get them to load a random exe file into a sample editor and play it back. The result is usually the most horrendous piece of crap you can imagine, that squeals and grates like a ZX spectrum on acid. I'm serious, it's not pure white noise, it really sounds horrible.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Aren't notes waves, so isn't any music with distinct notes in it full of patterns?
Meh! Any fourth grade beginning strings class does this. Mind you, the intent may be different, but the results are pretty much the same.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
It's only repetition-free if you can hear the intervals accurately, so that a jump from (say) a low A to an F-sharp five octaves up really sounds completely different to you from a jump from a low A to an E. I can't hear long jumps that accurately. By picking notes out of the 88-key keyboard, they get music in which the note-to-note interval jumps are much larger than they are in a traditional tune or theme. Those jumps are so large--and so divorced from any total center--that I, at least, don't hear them as musical intervals at all, but as dramatic contrasts of "high" and "low."
Well, the pattern of "highs" and "lows," divorced from interval, is, in fact one of the salient things we hear in music. There was even a dictionary of music themes once in which you looked up (and could find) themes from symphonies, etc. simply by looking up the pattern of ascending and descending notes. I forget how it was encoded, but you could look up, say START-DOWN-DOWN-UP-UP-UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-DOWN-UP-UP and it would tell you "The Star-Spangled Banner." People who can't actually read music can use sheet music as a memory aid for remembering notes, just by reading whether the successive notes ascend or descend, without being able to tell a quarter from a half note, or sense the actual intervals. The pattern of ascent and descent conveys much less of the music than the actual intervals, or the rhythm, but it nevertheless is part of the music.
Unfortunately for the goal of producing repetition-free music, there are only so many up-and-down patterns, and in the musical clip I felt I was hearing repetitions of short up-down sequences. Similarly, NOTE, big-multioctave-jump-up, NOTE, somewhat-jump-up, NOTE sounds similar to NOTE, big-multioctave-jump-up, NOTE, somewhat-jump-up, NOTE even if the intervals aren't identical and the note durations aren't identical.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I am not sure I agree to the postulate that music without patterns is ugliest. It may not be prettiest, but it should be shown that purposeful ugliness with repetitions cannot exceed pattern-free one.
Actually it's "useful" in the way mathematics stuff is always beautifully useless. You see, if you wanted to do echolocation with a piano (or any other 88-note instrument), this would be the piece that gave you maximum information on the target.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation#Acoustic_features
Believe it or not, if you played this music often you would (after a loong time) become able to hear the differences in the room the music was played in, just by the sound.
Bats use this to accomplish something that seems implausibly difficult, some species use it to dive through moving branches composing the upper level of a forest, in the dark (and they're blind or near-blind anyway), filled with environmental sounds and general noises, at ~ 180 km/h. When stationary they can use the tones to see through walls, and tell from the outside if anything in a room or cave is moving or not, including the rhythm of it's movement.
Sorry, (C)rap and hip-hop have already been invented. Nothing can ever be uglier than that!
Try Karlheinz Stockhausen or György Ligeti on for size.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
This calls into question the very definition of the word "music". If it is made to be free of any pattern and will almost certainly offend most ears, used as they are to hearing music that for hundreds (thousands?) of years has taken into account the interplay of harmonic resonance and the Fibonacci sequence-based perception of sound in the ear and brain, will it be perceived as "music"? Is it music just because someone calls it that, if it doesn't meet any significant subset of the admittedly enormous variety of criteria different people use to decide for themselves what IS versus IS NOT music? If I release an album of just white-noise or just pink-noise, and CALL it "Sounds of entropy" is that okay? Would being able to produce that make me a musician?
Actually, it's not only music a mathematician could have written, it's also an interpretation only a mathematician could reach. In contrast to what this guy calls perfect lack of repetition the music doesn't lack all repetition. It merely lacks a very distinct property. As I understand it, the special thing about that piece is that not any two subsequent notes differ in the same amount of frequency. Analogous the rhythm. So first of all are trivial and obvious patterns of repetition left: e.g. you will find many times two notes where the second is higher than the first. Or you will find passages, where the tones are de- or ascending, maybe even tied with a similarly shaped rhythm (think of relatively fast or slow sequences). And then there are also properties of sound, which cannot be expressed in formal languages as in modern musical theory. In fact, I would argue that there kinds of music in the world, whose point cannot be expressed by classical formal musical theory. The takeaway or the crucial perspective should be here, that your listening to music is always an act of construction. You will read sense or pattern or intention or whatever you want into music, depending on your socialization, your mood or your capabilities. People will tend to simplify more complex phenomena by means of more general concepts (high following high instead of the actual and precise note pitch and so on). So this interference of mathematics is not so provocative after all. If you can't find a point in this music - fine. But that does not depend on a single and not even most prominent mathematical property.
Just my $Currency*0.02
one thinks it may be eerie to be a dolphin these days then, with that ping.
"see mysterious dolphin deaths"
It does not sound that bad.
On another note. It is not repetition that makes music sound good. It is much more in coherence, predictability and the odd part that goes counter predictable that makes music sound great.
Much of the beauty of music is in the way it is played. The piano player in the TED video was so kind to take the music seriously and make the best of it, i.e. suggesting structure by subtly varying the duration of notes relative to how they are written in the score. The piece would be much uglier when converted into a midi file and played automatically on an electric piano.
He's wrong about Schoenberg here. What Schoenberg was doing with his note row was to find a way to organise music which is atonal. In essence; to provide order in the absence of a tonal system. He most definitely wasn't looking for 'pattern free' structures. Ironically, 12-tone music is highly ordered and full of patterns, not least, the row itself!
Isn't inter-disciplinary research fun?
Unfortunately the experiment wasn't complete. He was talking about beauty in music, but constrained the performer to playing only single notes on a single medium -- the piano. The next natural step would have been to try to make it beautiful, either through use of dynamics, counterpoint, etc.
That's how Fatso played when he didn't have that bloke's arms up his jumper moving his paws for him.
Now we all know how he creates his music!!
Ugliest music vote from me goes to Alfred Schnittke. The difference is Schnittke is full of emotion and quite enjoyable to listen to in the correct mood.
Maybe it's because I'm autistic but I hear a couple different patterns in there
pattern-free music is an oxymoron. music is sound. sound is waves of air. waves are patterns.
It is not a pattern beforehand or during generation because you cannot predict the next element.
If he is trying to "compose" a piece of music that has an emphasis on complete avoidance of rhythmic and tonal repetition, shouldn't he have at the very least researched atonal music? "Total Serialism" does the exact same thing he is doing, but done by hand and far less complicated.