Mathematically Pattern-Free Music 234
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the why-i-hate-the-radio dept.
from the why-i-hate-the-radio dept.
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..."
Rap music (Score:3, Funny)
That's nothing- rap musicians have been doing this for decades.
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Already Done (Score:4, Funny)
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Mod it up. Very funny.
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In all seriousness it has already been done. You can generate music based on a Thue-Morse sequence [wikipedia.org], which is repetition free: http://reglos.de/musinum/ [reglos.de]
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I thought someone would go with something more obvious and contextual, like so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfVsfOSbJY0 [youtube.com]
I'm surprised that something even more obvious [youtube.com] hasn't shown up here yet.
If you walk without rhythym, (Score:4, Funny)
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Step 2... (Score:5, Funny)
I thought (Score:2)
The consensus was that "Friday" already held that title.
autechre (Score:2)
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Schoenberg [wikipedia.org] +1
cure but... (Score:3)
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I prefer the more recent Nick Didkovsky, the father of JMSL [algomusic.com]
Re:cure but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Except the "music" described in the video isn't random. To quote: "Random is easy. Repetition free, it turns out, is extremely difficult."
=Smidge=
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John Cage is interesting, but he created music that was random. That's not what this is.
randomness != chance (Score:4, Interesting)
John Cage's music employed chance, not randomness. I posted [slashdot.org] 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.
Mathematics of Ramsey (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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Re:Mathematics of Ramsey (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Mathematics of Ramsey (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Mathematics of Ramsey (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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It's already been done (Score:2)
Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima [wikipedia.org] 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 [youtube.com]
They forgot that harmony is beauty too (Score:3)
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Actually, I liked it. It was very thoughtful and complex. Beautiful. So as far as I am concerned, they failed, albeit in a very interesting way. Art is like that.
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Absolutely. I'd listen to it on purpose. What is ugly to some is beautiful to others. I think part of what makes that still beautiful is that the individual notes from a good piano that is apparently in tune as far as I can tell, are distant enough in time to allow me to forget the previous note's relationship to it.
If you really want to make ugly music, use notes generated by different poorly tuned instruments in disrepair and speed it up.
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Actually, I liked it. It was very thoughtful and complex. Beautiful. So as far as I am concerned, they failed, albeit in a very interesting way. Art is like that.
I agree with both of you. Paradoxically, they made the piece interesting (and thus in a real sense, beautiful) by establishing a reason to listen to it.
cabbalists will cry foul (Score:2)
This kills off any kabbalist's notion of the importance of numbers as such. Now music have no pattern, too.
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Kabbalah is just Numerology with beaded curtains and shag carpeting.
More! (Score:2)
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.
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Not you - it's the premise (Score:2)
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
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Wha? (Score:2)
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
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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.
1. He never plays the same note twice. (A Costas array is a permutation) In a random piece, the same note can (and probably will) appear more than once.
2. If he plays middle A, then middle B (consecutive notes), he'll never play consecutive notes (e.g. C_0 and D_0) again. 3. If he plays middle A, then something else, then middle B, he'll never play consecutive notes spaced by another note again. 4. If he plays middle A, then two
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The Residents (Score:2)
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. [youtube.com] 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.
Prime numbers? (Score:3)
Primes have no patterns, so why not just map sounds/beats to prime numbers?
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Primes have no patterns, so why not just map sounds/beats to prime numbers?
But what will you use when you run out of primes?
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PI also has no pattern [newscientist.com], why didn't they choose it?
Your post is a good example of a bad argument, or a good question. At some point he says something like "A piano happens to have 88 keys", as if it were an afterthought.
The point here was to find something that was completely pattern free, but can also be represented by some sort of musical instrument. Mathematically proven pattern free, not just apparently pattern free. So you would have to use primes mod 88. No one has proven that primes mod 88 is pat
Randomness? Mathematical music? Sounds bad? (Score:2)
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 is worst than that (Score:2)
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!
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uses each key once (Score:2)
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?
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'pattern-free'...aka 'noise' (Score:2)
So...this guy is trying to recreate white noise, then? I'm pretty sure there's an app for that...
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Or you could ... (Score:2)
Not that bad... (Score:2)
Now get off my lawn...
He could have just saved some time... (Score:2)
...and put on some Rush. :-)
Listen up kids... (Score:2)
To the under 25s: This is what kids will be listening to when you're middle-aged. Enjoy. :)
Scientific noisegrind (Score:2)
I shudder at the thought of what happens when the noisegrind [wikipedia.org] community discovers this research.
One for the hardline relativists out there (Score:2)
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.
Old Hat (Score:2)
Ascent-descent patterns do repeat (Score:2)
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 a
Re:I can go one better (Score:4, Informative)
Random != no pattern
You might create a tune with no pattern but chances are there will be a pattern of some kind in there.
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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 [berkeley.edu] - we actually bias towards alternating patterns, which is decidedly non-random.
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Re:I can go one better (Score:4, Interesting)
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cat? Real men use dd.
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/dsp
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Why dd? Neither is a block device.
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It's got to sound better than Richard MacDuff's tax return.
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This isn't non-mathematical random "music", it is mathematical "music" that is patternless. The first isn't music at all, while the second doesn't qualify by most definitions but could by logical extension (which mathematicians do so love.) I personally, as a musician, don't think either one would be music.
Random is trivial, as the TEDx Talk explained. (Score:2)
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 ke
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> Completely devoid of repetition is vastly more difficult.
Maybe not. I'd just play pi.
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pi has repition, here and thee, as all random sequences to. A non-repeating sequence isn't random (though some find that very non-inutitive, an dhtere are a few associated probability paradoxes).
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> pi has repition, here and thee .. an dhtere are a few
I don't hear well, but I thought I heard "raw passion, her and thee ... and tear our nephew" But that part about the nephew makes no sense. So please repeat what you said, more slowly if you could.
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There is plenty of "pattern-free" music that is not randomly generated.
Going back to at least the late 50s, there has been "free jazz" that does not have the kind of patterns that one associates with Western music, yet it is anything but random.
As someone who has been working with electronic and computer music since the mid '70s, I am always amused when mathematicians or computer scientists try to use particular algorithms to create music, but leave
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In a way I'd agree. The point of the exercise was really just to demonstrate pattern-free music. I think this could be used in a more artistic fashion, perhaps running loops of the piece played in different "axis" for instance rotate the grid 90 degrees. One could add patterns of different sizes to counterpoint as well. I'm surprised they used a person and not a Disclavier, a real piano that can be MIDI controlled, to write something much more complex.
But again, that's creating a pattern by using the patter
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There is a term used by some of the improvisers, the "endless melody" or the "open line". Eric Dolphy and Claude Debussey called it the "unending line".
It is the unfolding melody, not repeating, that goes from here to there without any repeating sections. I'm tired at the moment, so all I can think of is some of the work of Jimmy Giuffre or Paul Bley, but there have been many others. In t
Re:Not that random (Score:4, Interesting)
Apophenia. [wikipedia.org]
Pareidolia. [wikipedia.org]
We're wired to see patterns; if there aren't any we'll make them up with no conscious effort or intent at all.
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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 s
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I think music like this would actually be really, really good for horror movies. It was a bit unsettling.
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More likely Math Noise.
Without patterns you don't have music, you simply have noise.
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More likely Math Noise.
Without patterns you don't have music, you simply have noise.
What makes music music is the intent (not the content) of the sound. An artistic expression rendered in sound is music. Even if the sound is noise.
Whether it's good music is, or course, another discussion.
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Why do you have in and con in bold? Are you trying to con me into something?
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I disagree, since in that case 4'33" wouldn't be music either.
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No, patternless music it's just crap.
Only in the last 100 years somebody who tried to sell noise as music/cuts in a canvas as painting/shit in a can as sculpture wasn't lynched.
"Applications" of math (Score:2)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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 s
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I won't say I enjoyed it. But it was better then Yawny. It was shorter.
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The math can't, the representation of it can.
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A random number generator can generate patterns.
The old hypothetical monkeys-at-typewriters eventually banging out a Shakespeare play describes this. Essentially the monkeys are just a bunch of random character generators. Even if they don't write Shakespeare, they'll eventually stumble across some sort of pattern purely by random chance.
Even though the pattern is not intentional, a pattern can be formed.
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Anything that is deemed "mathematically random" nowadays is, in fact, so very finely tuned to appear random that it is the exact opposite of random.
Well, that's the opposit of true. "mathematically random" data has patterns. This music doesn't, meaning it's not random, and would sound different from random noise, though "apparantly random" is apt.
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I guarantee you that the noise this guy shat out has more identifiable patterns in it than what you'd get from any RNG not used by Sony.
OK. Point them out to us. I'll listen again.
A pattern is any recognizable characteristic of a thing.
If that's how you're going to define "pattern" then everything in the universe is a pattern. Such definitions are meaningless because there isn't any useful information to glean from them.
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That makes one of you.
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Or no notes, but i guess Cage's 4'33" did that already
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No, you are correct. There is a pattern. A better title would have been "...Repetition-Free Music". Any given set of notes within the "song" has no similar set of notes at another point in the piece. If you were to instead map pi's digits to music, there would be small pieces that repeat. For example, there are several occurrences of the pattern 141593 in the first million digits, and several more occurrences of 252604, and 363715, and so on. All of those would sound similar if mapped to notes. In a