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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
......"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
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
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
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.
Random != no pattern
You might create a tune with no pattern but chances are there will be a pattern of some kind in there.
For a good time, cat $file > /dev/dsp. My favourite so far is the PS file of Shannon's information theory paper.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Apophenia.
Pareidolia.
We're wired to see patterns; if there aren't any we'll make them up with no conscious effort or intent at all.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
Random != no pattern
You might create a tune with no pattern but chances are there will be a pattern of some kind in there.
Exactly. This is why sports fans think that there's such a thing as form. Human beings are very bad at judging randomness - we actually bias towards alternating patterns, which is decidedly non-random.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Primes have no patterns, so why not just map sounds/beats to prime numbers?
Not only that, but if you actually sat and listened to it, it had a weird sense of incompleteness. It's like you;re looking for some pattern and not finding it.
Not at all "bad" - it certainly elicited an emotional response from me. I wanted it to be complete, to have a pattern, and so I ended up listening to it to find one.
I've heard worse - music that has a pattern but that's completely devoid of interest and impact. This is music that devoid of pattern and therefore draws your interest.
I could really see this being orchestrated/arranged and be really cool.
Typical of them artists to ruin a perfectly ugly piece of music by their .... artistry. It should have been performed by a computer for proper ugliness!
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.
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.