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Music Media Science

What Math Actually Sounds Like 185

Posted by timothy from the and-not-just-like-a-hatchet dept.
cellophane writes "If Verdi had a math fetish and a computer, would he be John Greschak? Greschak composes music based upon the mathematical properties of various mathematical objects (e.g. a six-sided die or pentominoes). He writes computer programs to realize devised algorithms and uses the results of these processes as source material for musical pieces. Greschak's newest addition, Platonic Dice: Dodecahedron for 12 woodwinds, was created by using musical material derived from the mathematical properties of one of the Platonic dice. Well, its not Verdi, but its definitely interesting."
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What Math Actually Sounds Like

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  • Great, now can we expect... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gregwbrooks ( 512319 ) <gregbNO@SPAMwest-third.net> on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:30PM (#4539103)
    ... to see thousands of web-porn banners screaming "see Dodecahedrons in hot back-stage action now!!!"

  • I don't like it as much as mallcore (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SexyKellyOsbourne ( 606860 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:31PM (#4539106) Journal
    It's not as good at the latest crazy town album, but in case it's slashdotted -- it sounds very strange, twangy, almost random, and VERY, VERY dissonant. However, it's quite beautiful.

    Fractal Music [thinks.com] is quite interesting, as well, and oddly it still sounds more orderly than Platonic Dice.

  • To be math sounds like "No! What do you mean it didn't check!" or "What do you mean, pi r squared?"

  • Yup, pretty much like I thought (Score:5, Funny)

    by McCart42 ( 207315 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:33PM (#4539117) Homepage
    I anticipate that Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti will spend the hereafter listening to this, if there is any sense of justice in the afterlife.
  • since music is based on math anyway, i don't see why it isn't possible to write a program to generate pleasing music... or at the very least, some basic music themes.

    true, computers are a long way away from replacing humans, namely since sometimes the most interesting piece of music to the human ear isn't always the most mathematically pleasing.

    -John

    • Re:AI composers? might not be far away. (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You are wrong! Nothing is based on math, we actually use math to explain something, not the other way around.

      Former blues players in Mississipi didn't have a clue about math. And fractal was invented in order to study plants, and it's a well known fact that plants were around way before human being could count their 10 fingers.
    • Feelings...

      The problem with AI is simply not being able to create patterns / identify patterns / modify patterns. True, AI can do pattern matching, but not to the level of a musical composer.

      Humans have already reached a limit to the classical rules of music, which is partly responsible for the contemprary period in music history, but a computer can still only attempt to play chess, which is infinitly easier than composing great music, and not even attempt to play other games like go...

  • Reminds me of a star trek Voyager episode... (Score:3)

    by CoolVibe ( 11466 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:34PM (#4539123) Journal
    ...where the EMH was teaching some alien race about music and art. Also "music" from mathematical models were played with...

    Julia sets would sound pretty cool I gather :)

    • I think the interesting thing (if we are thinking of the same episode) is that he was replaced by a 'more perfect' singing program, whereas he had tried very hard to make his program adopt certain human tones and styles.

      Even if the new program was technically better and/or more accurate, the doctor wasn't terribly happy about being replaced...

      • Yes exactly! That episode is what I meant.

        Imagine how musicians worldwide will feel if they get replaced by mathematical algorythms. I myself am a guitar player, I'm not fantasically good, but probably better than Taco (I know more than 3 chords, heh), but I would hate it too if people preferred fully computer-generated music over the warm acoustic tones of my 6-string.

  • What die do I use (Score:5, Funny)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi@[ ]oo.com ['yah' in gap]> on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:35PM (#4539127) Journal
    to make a saving throw against the MIDI sounds coming out of my speaker?

    Please hook up a sampler and record it that way.

    I like the music, its just that the MIDI kills me.

  • puhhhlleeeassseeee (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <slashdot.monkelectric@com> on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:36PM (#4539132)
    Music has mathmatical patters, that does not mean math makes good music. People have been trying to discover algorithims which can generate music for years, and this guy has not advanced the science any.

    This is truely one of the worst things i've ever heard. And I own a gravel [trouserpress.com] album so thats saying quite a lot.

    • Re:puhhhlleeeassseeee (Score:5, Funny)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis&gmail,com> on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:39PM (#4539147) Homepage
      I agree. Man was that horrible. I could make better music by dropping a drum set down a Tibetan mountain side.

      Tom
      • Can't argue there. If you look at Mozart or Bach, there music is FAR from random. Good music is very calculated. Even heavy metal usually has some sort of order to it. Whereas, as I understand it, this has none.

    • Analyzing music, not creating it (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Music has mathmatical patters, that does not mean math makes good music. People have been trying to discover algorithims which can generate music for years, and this guy has not advanced the science any.

      True enough. The only good overlap I've seen between mathematics and music has been the use of math to analyze music written by humans. For an example of such analysis, please refer to the landmark work by Meloon and Sprott [wisc.edu].

    • Close Encounters of 3rd Kind (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This is truely one of the worst things i've ever heard

      Is it just me or did that sound like something from the music 'conversation' in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? I mean, if the aliens were drugged-out at the time...

    • I haven't listened to it yet, but this effort reminds me of the time I spent in college (as a comp major) listening to Cage and some of the other more, um, differently-thinking composers. I remember one piece we heard in class, entitled "36 Variations on a Door and Sigh." Granted, this isn't mathetmatical, but it's every bit as um, abstract...yeah, that's it...abstract.
    • One of the reasons I quit being a composer was because I was sick of listening to people brag about how they 'created "music"' (I use double quotes because those are doubly sarcastic :) ) by plugging in notes to algorithms, shapes, graphs, and the like. All it is is people trying to be 'unique' (just like the thousands exactly like them) by filling in notes instead of actually sitting down and writing music. It was an interesting concept like 50 years ago when people started messing with it (notice I still don't call it music); now it's just tired and cheap. Ahhhh... I've been waiting to whine about this for YEARS. :)

    • Re:puhhhlleeeassseeee (Score:3, Interesting)

      by namespan ( 225296 )
      The aesthetic qualities you hear in music are all in the functions you use to map a mathematical pattern to sound. One that corresponds to your aesthetics will sound good. One that doesn't won't.

      I've been doing this sort of thing since high school, on and off. The conclusion that I came to about five years ago is that there might actually be a reason why most scales/tonal systems people have come up with have some basis in the harmonic series. Since then, it's been interesting trying to come up with algorithms that work with it.

      Why am I not posting links? Because this is done in my spare time, and what I've come up with is still crummy. But I think the idea might be significant...

    • The classic text on the music-math connection is still being used to teach some technical theory classes: "On the Sensation of Tone" by Hermann Helmholtz. It's a fascinating (though dry) read if you enjoy reading about math.

      When I was studying Computer Science, one of the things that really struck me was how similar some of the problem solving was between data structures and musical composition.

      Of course, there are a lot of similarities between human languages and computer science, as well. These are Big subjects with a lot of different facets, so they are bound to overlap. That's what makes it fun!

  • Listen to some Mozart. The man was a mathematical genius.

  • Where's the emotion? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by manly_15 ( 447559 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:42PM (#4539159)
    The poster was right - this is not Verdi. Music is not just an expression of mathematical equations. What these compositions are missing is the feeling, the tension, the journey that music should take you on. Serious music lovers like myself all would say that the best music is that which is filled with emotion. That includes classical music like Beethoven and Handel; it also (at least IMHO) includes newer music from bands like The Tea Party, Our Lady Peace, or my favourite indie band, Das Radio [nbnet.nb.ca].

    The true breakthrough will be when equations can be used to create music with emotion. Unfortunately, that will probably be years away...

    • Re:Where's the emotion? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MagPulse ( 316 )
      Even if software was written to create music that fooled people into believing a human wrote it, would people want to listen to it? When I listen to music, I want to know there's a real person behind it, who is going through the human experience just as I am. Maybe if a robot, or even body-less artificial life, some day composes music it will be worth listening to, but true human-composed music will always have some appeal to it.
    • Cringing in anguish *is* an emotional response, non?

  • for 12 woodwinds? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Drunken Coward ( 574991 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:44PM (#4539167)
    Sounds like "for 12 monkeys with kazoos."

    No, I take that back. It didn't sound that good.
  • Worst. Music. Ever.
  • Think about it - even the most mathematically simple bits of music (r'n'b background music, three-chord punk, etc) rely on the utterly random variations in the human voice to make them interesting. While you could concievably generate some interesting musical backdrops using computers, unless you're that type of person who spends a thousand notes on headphones you're not going to notice.

    Still, it beats The Ketchup Song.

  • Roll your own... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:50PM (#4539193)


    I haven't tried it yet, but a couple of days ago a message went out on guile-user saying that the Common Music [stanford.edu] composition language has been ported to GUILE. (It is a Lisp-based program that already worked with several varieties of Lisp; see the link for more info.)

    It supports ordinary composition, but its toolbox [stanford.edu] supports stuff like random selection and interpolation into envelopes, which ought to make exploitation of the mathematical properties of objects pretty easy.

  • Music based on the mathematics of dice? Sounds like music to play D&D by.

  • I've heard this music before (Score:5, Funny)

    by dfn5 ( 524972 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:55PM (#4539210) Journal
    I used to hear this every day in high school during band practice.... while everyone was warming up.
    I wouldn't exactly call it music though...

  • Why use math? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pVoid ( 607584 )
    Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking. The musical system is, as it is, very heavily mathematical (resonance and harmonics etc)...

    We are looking at this from the wrong way around, people should be looking for incredible mathematical leit-motives and patterns in already existing music such as Mozart or whatever...

    All of these attempts to show that math is beautiful (or just attempts to make math an auditory experience) seem kind of ridiculous to me... kind of like if someone tried to make paintings using the vertex rendering methods used in Quake 1... sure it's a noble idea, but the hill to climb is in the other direction: to make vertex renderings that look like Van Gogh.

    As for the music I heard on that page. It's 'curious'... nothing more. If you really want odd sounding yet beautiful harmonics, listen to some Joe Zawinul on piano...

    sigh. all this, in IMHO (tm).
    • Who's "we", Kimosabe? Music theorists have mathematically analyzed all of those patterns from Mozart/Bach/Brahms/whoever-you-revere. Using determinism (like dice, I-Ching, 12-tone serialism, etc.) to generate music came from that mathematical analysis.

      (from someone who sat around analyzing that music for five years!)

      • Ahh. nice. Someone who's done research on this...

        Ok, let me define 'we' and what I mean: first of all, I will not generalize to make a rule. I myself studied a lot of math for a while, and am very much in love with it.

        I have found that if something sounds good, and someone shows me how very mathematical it is, I am truly amazed. I am amazed though, more than anything else, at how certain mathematical principles are embedded within us... and how there's such a fine balance in the human brain (or lack thereof sometimes, as in autistic kids who 'stim' themselves... I digress). That discovery of how our selves are actually in certain ways predictable and analyzable inspires awe in me.

        The 'we' I'm talking about is this general tendency - and again, I don't want to generalize, so rather: attempts in this day and age to generate art using computers, techonology, math, whatever...
        Now if you are generating this music to test your theories, the fruits of those years of mathematical analysis, more power to you. But if the end is to have a formula that creates pleasing music, I think the idea is flawed.

        To abstract it further one step, (and I hate to sound like Darth Vader but), I think 'we' as humans might be starting to trust in our technology (in the original sense: ie knowledge of techniques) much more than we should.

        Anyways, I could ramble on for hours, it's saturday night, and I'm tired mentally. This all is IMHO. And just to make it clear, I'm not dismissing *anyone's* efforts.

  • A good use for this music, except... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Alsee ( 515537 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:56PM (#4539214) Homepage
    I would propose making monsterously huge speakers and blasting this into Iraq, but in my oppinion it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention.

    -

    • Already been done (Score:3, Interesting)

      by GuyMannDude ( 574364 )

      I would propose making monsterously huge speakers and blasting this into Iraq, but in my oppinion it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention.

      Actually, we've done stuff like that before [psywarrior.com]

      GMD


      • > > I would propose making monsterously huge speakers and blasting this into Iraq, but in my oppinion it would be a violation of the Geneva Convention.

        > Actually, we've done stuff like that before [psywarrior.com]

        Heh. I do it to my neighbors every Saturday night. It's not my fault that not everyone things The Who at 120db is good music.

      • Yep, the USA set up speakers and blasted Noriega when he was being removed from power in Panama. We played all sorts of music by Guns N' Roses, The Birthday Party, Pussy Galore, Sonic Youth, the Rolling Stones and many more. However, there was one song they did not play which would have been perfect.

        That song is "Panama", by Van Halen.

        What an opportunity wasted! :)

  • Confucious says... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dr. Cody ( 554864 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @07:58PM (#4539222)
    The truely wise man posts his music in MIDI before summiting his webpage to Slashdot.
  • It sounds..interesting...

    In my opinion, the project holds great promise, but it certainly needs to be refined. I believe it would be possible to mathematically generate music that people would enjoy, but it requires a more in-depth knowledge of different scales, rhythms, the technicals of different musical styles, and other nuiances that would make a huge different in the listenability of the randomly generated works.

    Though technically sound, the human mind is as capable of piecing it together as an English-speaker is able to understand Cantonese right out of the box. Not to say that he could not learn eventually, but would always be more suited to his native language.

    And that's why we need to remember our audience when composing music!

  • This sounds very much like... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Aiwendel ( 230929 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @08:03PM (#4539244)
    ...the music of Arnold Schoenberg. He was a german composer in the early 20th century who wrote very atonal pieces using what he called "tone rows" - a particular note could not be used again until all of the other 11 notes in the chromatic scale had been used.
    • Schoenburg created what was is called Serialism [xrefer.com]. The basic concept that Shoenburg thought up was to constrain the tones by making a strict rule: in his case you must use all 12 notes in some sort of sequence, but no notes may be used twice until the sequence has terminated. This is known more commonly as 12-Tone Music.

      However, this idea can be extended to other aspects of music: tempo, rhythm, dynamics, etc. The idea of putting formulaic constraints like this is called Total Serialism [scu.edu.au]. The guy in this article is just another total serialist.. using the platonic dice to constrain the music. The idea of constraining music with math is not new.. it's been around since the 1920's.
    • Schonberg didn't always compose atonally. Schonberg started off composing in the romantic style, but then started experimenting with twelve-tone technique with pieces of Serenade and Piano Suite. While twelve-tone technique is what keeps Schonberg famous, the majority of his work doesn't use this method, or doesn't use it exclusively.

      And just a side note, the music that uses this method does have quite a bit of structure in it, so it isn't like listening to random noise, rendered by a musician.

  • Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Politas ( 1535 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @08:04PM (#4539247) Homepage Journal
    Didn't Douglas Adams come up with this idea? It was a program called Anthem, which turned a company's financials into music, rather than geometric shapes, but the idea's the same.
  • For those interested, check out the music by Iannis Xenakis. Architect by trade, he wrote music based on mathematical series, probability, and much, much more. Difficult to appreciate, certainly, but most 'classical' music is, regardless of tonality, harmony, or length. He even wrote a book, or several, about the processes and the background to his works. Definitely worth checking out, especially for the engineers amongst you. The maths is nearly mind-boggling.
    One of the books can be found here. [amazon.com]

  • Wolfram ! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by orcaaa ( 573643 )
    It seems that the best music seems to come from a seemingly random composition of chords. While it would be computationally infeasible to write an equation that describes the chords for an entire song, it would be possible to generate cellular automata, based on rules devised by Wolfram and other people, which closely resemble the music we like. Some rules described in A New Kind of Science, by Wolfram predict cell patterns which are seemingly random but yet repeat at some intervals of time. Such kind of rules could be, IMveryHO, used to produce some rather melodious music.

    • Re:Wolfram ! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Alyeska ( 611286 )
      This is simply wrong. It is *very* possible to write an equation to describe the chords for an entire song. This is what music theorists do, and it's nothing new. The same mathematical system used to quantify harmony in Bach's day is still in place today, still required (for two years at most schools) at nearly every music school for all students.

  • Too bound by the math. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by erik_fredricks ( 446470 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @08:24PM (#4539316)
    Schoenberg tried the same sort of thing in 1921 or so. He invented the "twelve tone" system, in which the twelve chromatic tones were arranged according to mathematical sets. He even remarked to one of his students that he had come up with an idea that would, "ensure the domination of German music in the 20th century."

    The basic idea was neat in that it removed conscious choice from the equation and resulted in melodic and harmonic combinations that wouldn't normally occur to a composer. Serialism, as it's called, is still being taught and used to this day, even if I find it tiresome myself. Basically, this is just another facet of that serial system.

    It has a unique kind of icy, remote quality, but music isn't really meant to be appreciated on an intellectual level so much as an emotional one. True enough, you can have a satisfying balance of both (like Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier), but purely intellectual stuff like this just isn't all that interesting outside of certain circles. Schoenberg's students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern did a much better job of writing listenable music with the system, mostly because they allowed some human influence in the model.
    • Alban Berg and Anton Webern did a much better job of writing listenable music with the system, mostly because they allowed some human influence in the model. Berg, yes. But Webern? His serial stuff is the most mathematically precise and boring stuff I've ever studied. Maybe I've just looked at the wrong stuff. Schoenberg's serial and even free atonal stuff is far more interesting. And as a music geek, I love contemporary music.
    • The basic idea was neat in that it removed conscious choice from the equation....

      That's not really accurate. Scheonberg was trying to force composers into thinking of sounds they wouldn't have otherwise, but for him, conscious choice was still very much a part of the picture. He was an expressionist -- meaning that he was still interested in expressing, not merely generating.

      The real philosophical bullet of twelve-tone was not the removal of conscious choice ... quite the opposite, in fact: it was the idea that composers could make a conscious choice of what formal musical system to follow, and in fact, one could consciously invent a whole formal system out of thin air. Prior to Schoenberg, music had been philosophically rooted in a sort quasi-religious of sense of cosmic order, and he said, "No, look, I can just make up a system! No cosmic order to it -- just conscious choice."

      The aesthetic problem that 12-tone faces is that music theory is usually a model, a post-hoc way of dissecting music, more than it is a way of constructing it. Traditional "functional tonality" (Bach, Beethoven, Beatles) evolved very organically out of basic physics and human perception, and seems to resonate more easily with listeners than Schoenberg's consciously concocted system.

      However, I think Scheonberg actually did a fine job of making conscious aesthetic choices that produced some excellent music. It was really other composers who took serialism to its absurdly deterministic extremes. Now Webern ... Webern I find horribly cold and dry, more interesting to read on paper than hear. So there's individual taste for you! :)

      This dodecahedral thing doesn't really turn my crank, but dumb old MIDI will suck the soul out of most any classically composed music ... so it's had to say what it might be like with live players.

  • Ouch (Score:1)

    by m0i ( 192134 )
    If it sounds that bad, RIAA will use it to test-bed P2P and prove that it can't work ;)
  • When the refresh rate of my monitor is too low and I set it back my body always does this strange shaking thing. Turning this music off does the same thing.
  • Actually, there already is a shitload of math behind music. Douglas Hofstadter describes the intimate relation of math and music (and some other seemlingly unrelated things in his book Godel, Escher, Bach [amazon.com].
  • If Verdi had a math fetish
    This gives a whole new meaning to "NP-hard"...

    For another related site about creating weird sounds, check out the CAITLIN project [unn.ac.uk]...it creates music out of code. I wish I could get my hands on a copy of their code, it'd be interesting to see what happened when I ran my programs through it...


    • > For another related site about creating weird sounds, check out the CAITLIN project [unn.ac.uk]...it creates music out of code. I wish I could get my hands on a copy of their code, it'd be interesting to see what happened when I ran my programs through it...

      My "Hello, world!" blew up, but I'm still famous for my "Concerto in C# for two strings and a segfault".

  • I'll tell you what math sounds like (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It sounds like the unholy scream of ultimate suffering. BTW, I'm a math major. Thinking of getting a minor in music.

  • Fractal Music (Score:3, Informative)

    by weird mehgny ( 549321 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @08:40PM (#4539361)
    Makes me think of this [mp3s.com] artist. Some of the MP3's are nice.

  • How about just... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jonman_d ( 465049 ) <nemilar@optonlCOUGARine.net minus cat> on Saturday October 26, 2002 @08:43PM (#4539372) Homepage Journal
    ...`cat pi.txt >> /dev/dsp`?
    Am I the only one that finds catting random things to the sound device[s] amusing?

    • Re:How about just... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'd try cat /dev/hda >> /dev/dsp, but we already know what 20 GB of pr0n sounds like & someone would get suspicous about all the moaning (I'm a virgin who reads slashdot--yes, I realize that that's redundant :)

      • I'm a virgin who reads slashdot--yes, I realize that that's redundant

        You're saying that all slashdot readers are virgins? Wha? Hmmm. I'd better go have a talk with my wife... if I'm a virgin I want to know who just those kids' *real* father is... and I can tell you that bastard is gonna pay (braces, dance uniforms, college).

    • I do, I just keep forgetting exactly how to do it. And the last time, I couldn't get anything else to use the sound card. ; )
  • John Cage and Elliot Carter have been doing music from logical or random sequences and very math-like stuff since the 70's. (I claim no special personal knowledge; my wife was a cello performance major.) While this is interesting, it isn't totally new to music.

  • Math proofs set to music (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you want to listen to math in a raw uninterpreted form, try mathematical proofs set to music on the Metamath Music Page [flatline.de].

  • This is not Slashdot worthy (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    or maybe it is, depending on just how artistically blind the /. reader population is. music based entirely on mathematics is nothing new, it's been relatively high-profile for the last hundred years. if you're going to give this guy lots of traffic from a slashdot post, the same thing should be done for all of the other computer music, algorithmic, and math-based composers out there. there are LOTS, and most of them are thousands of times more original than this guy.

  • Playing at this since Plato (Score:3, Informative)

    by rochlin ( 248444 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @08:59PM (#4539430) Homepage
    Non-musical types have been playing and producing mathematical music since Plato [k12.mn.us]. I can't say any of it ranks up there with "twinkle twinkle" (even). But it never hurts to try...
  • That sounded like a bunch of junior high kids warming up for band practice. I should know... I was one of those kids. =)
  • Dear God that was some of the worst music I've ever heard. Making music derived from math is great, but couldn't it at least have a catchy tune instead of sounding like random noise?

  • Milton Babbitt (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gmaestro ( 316742 ) <jason.guidryNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday October 26, 2002 @09:30PM (#4539561)
    Ok, this is interesting, but nothing new. Composers hava been using math and science for centuries in their music. Guillame Dufay used the architectural proportions of Brunelleschi's dome in Florence in the mensural changes in his Nuper rosarum flores in the 15th century. Polish composer Yannis Xenakis saught to explain the music of J.S. Bach with geomentry. American composer and mathmetician Milton Babbitt [schirmer.com] focused on algorithmic composition decades ago. And John Cage used the I Ching to randomize his music. The last two are often seen as extreme ways of composing music more objectively, though from different ideological perspectives.

    Granted, no one is writing about my music [gmaestro.org] anywhere :-]

  • Is this guy some kind of D&D freak or what?

  • What does music look like (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lost in place ( 248578 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @09:56PM (#4539657)
    This is not completely relevant, but people here might be interested in the converse question: What does music look like when viewed as a sequential, mathematical structure. This guy [bewitched.com] has analyzed a number of musical pieces and shows their structure. He also shows what sequential data look like.
  • ...some prodigal math genius at Wal-Mart the other day, because he appeared to be no more than 6 years old, yet he was playing the EXACT same song on a Kawasaki synthesizer [walmart.com].

  • Platonic Dice??!!?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Graff ( 532189 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @10:35PM (#4539813)

    John Greschak probably should do a bit more research on the subject of "Platonic Dice". What he is referring to are the Platonic solids [andrews.edu].

    In order for a solid to be a Platonic solid, it needs to be convex and have all its vertices (corners) to have the same number and size of regular polyhedrons touching them. For example, a cube is a Platonic solid because all of the vertices have 4 of the same size squares touching. There are only 5 Platonic solids possible: the Tetrahedron (4 sides), the Hexahedron (cube, 6 sides), Octahedron (8 sides), Dodecahedron (12 sides), Icosahedron (20 sides).

    There is also a class of related solids called Archimedian solids where the solids are convex, all vertices are identical, all faces are regular polygons, but not all of the faces are identical to each other.

    • Sigh, I reviewed this before posting and still missed an error. My third sentence should have read:

      In order for a solid to be a Platonic solid, it needs to be convex and have all its vertices (corners) to have the same number, size
      , and shape of regular polyhedrons touching them.
      Just to clarify, all of the faces on the solid need to be the exact same regular polyhedron.

  • If you remember math class (Score:3, Funny)

    by phorm ( 591458 ) on Saturday October 26, 2002 @11:40PM (#4539978) Journal
    You would already know what math sounds like

    Teacher: Class, today we're going to have a pop quiz

    Students: Groaaannn, whiinne, snifffle

    Depends on the audience though, a room full of geeks with a math fetish would probably make much more disturbing "music"...

    Disclaimer: I like math, but it's not a fetish - phorm
  • People have been writing math-based music since the '20s. In the '50s, it was probably the *most* common form of music written in conservatories -- the Romantic style was considered somewhat atavistic. Thank God those days are gone.

    It's called serialism [xrefer.com]. See Schoenberg, Berio and Boulez.

    --Tom, who strangely has a B. Mus. in composition.

  • Cage? Schoenberg? Varese? (Score:3, Informative)

    by dogfart ( 601976 ) on Sunday October 27, 2002 @12:51AM (#4540160) Homepage Journal
    Edgar Varese did some very strange, percussion-based music in the 1920's inspired by mathematics - such as Hyperprism and Integrales. Not 12-tone in the sense that Schoenberg did, but very different in its own way.

    He was incredibly an early influence on Frank Zappa.

    I'm not a music student, just an educated listener. Maybe someone better versed in 20th century music than I am can comment on the relevance of Varese to mathmatically-inspired music.

  • If Verdi had a math fetish and a computer, would he be John Greschak?

    I don't know if he would sound like Greschak, but he would definitely sound a bit like like Aphex Twin. :)
  • Rather modern, yes, but coming from a university with a famous music department (York, United Kingdom) I must say that a *lot* of students here are not up to that standard in their composition.

    A lot of musical 'styles' are expressible in standard formulae anyway, so I was told by a former music student, so using pure mathematical properties for the composition is not actually a very far-fetched idea.

    Hmm, to think about it, in the Royal School of Music theory examinations I took when I was small, there was always that bonus question at the end for identifying the composer of a given part of music...
  • Because by the time the professor gets to the QED we are all peacefully snoring on the table.
  • ...the computer will begin to make a hideous noise.
    [click]
    Aha! I was right!

    What is the point of trying to find out what a cube or a set of dominoes or whatever 'sounds like'?

    I can tell you right now, that if you try to find out what a chess board sounds like, you will find that it sounds bloody awful! The same goes for almost all other geometric models or mathematical sequences.

    Sure, look to maths for your inspiration; mess about with different equations and sequences until you find one that sounds interesting (supposing you aren't bothered by such pedestrian concepts as music that is pleasing to the ear). For instance, take a look at Aphex Twin's album 'windowlicker' through a scrolling spectrum analyser. There are some deliberately geometric shapes in there, and while they don't exactly sound great, they don't sound out of place in the music.

    Don't, however, assume that because something can be done that there is a benefit in doing it.

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