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..."

Comments

Rap music

[Oswald McWeany]

That's nothing- rap musicians have been doing this for decades.

Already Done

[Unloaded]

......"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

If you walk without rhythym,

[amstrad]

you won't attract the worm. Another piece of ugly music, Aphex Twin's Ventolin

Step 2...

[chinton]

2. Add Vogon poetry as lyrics. 3. Profit

Mathematics of Ramsey

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Mathematics of Ramsey

[curril]

Yeah, theory aside, the speaker was just multiplying by 3 modulus 89 so values less than 30 will always be followed by a higher value, a pattern that was easy to hear in the music. The speaker confused a lack of repetition of distances between notes as being a total lack of pattern.

Re:Mathematics of Ramsey

[johanatan]

Not only that but he apparently did by hand the 'computationally impossible'. That section of his talk was truly confused.

Re:Mathematics of Ramsey

[gnufrog]

True. Apologies. What I was trying to say was that it's really hard to, via brute force search, find large Costas arrays. In fact, we've only just been able to enumerate all 29-by-29 sized Costas arrays (took nearly 400 years of CPU time). To find all 30-by-30's will take 5 times longer; Each time we increase the size of the array by one, it takes about 5x longer to enumerate the space (don't know why that's the case). So, needless to say, we're going to have to wait a while to find even a single array of size 88-by-88 by brute force search. But, thanks to Galois+Golomb+Costas, we can just multiple by 3, 87 times, and find one. So we can construct what is very difficult to find via brute force search. To use 'computation' to mean 'brute force search' was a poor choice. My bad...

Re:I can go one better

[Anonymous Coward]

Random != no pattern

You might create a tune with no pattern but chances are there will be a pattern of some kind in there.

Re:I can go one better

[TeknoHog]

For a good time, cat $file > /dev/dsp. My favourite so far is the PS file of Shannon's information theory paper.

Re:Not that random

[idontgno]

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.

Re:cure but...

[Smidge204]

Except the "music" described in the video isn't random. To quote: "Random is easy. Repetition free, it turns out, is extremely difficult."

=Smidge=

randomness != chance

[ClickOnThis]

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.

Re:Prime numbers?

[cvnautilus]

Also Ulam Spiral