DATA-log

I’ve been kept busy by Schrödinger, Fourier and Dirac lately, but I had some free time finally and put together a more refined way to derive musical (or so) structures out of one dimensional cellular automata system. Partly inspired by the excelent lectures on early finnish experimental electronic music scene at the local media art museum (see http://mansedanse.com/events_fi.html).

The algorithm quantizes the chromatic scale down to any arbitrary scale and picks up two notes to be played. This produces a more music-like result than the total chaos of applying the whole automata state straight to the chromatic scale.. though I’m not saying that it can’t produce interesting results.

http://www.punainen.org/~biotek/cell0011.mp3

http://www.punainen.org/~biotek/cell0012.mp3

Here is the MATLAB code responsible for these, keep in mind though that the quantizer code was written in the middle of the night (I think you can tell) so there are probably some glitches to it.

http://www.punainen.org/~biotek/automata1.m

Connection machines were a line of parallel supercomputers built by Thinking Machines Corporation. Notably Stephen Wolfram and Richard Feynman were involved in the early years of the corporation.

Here are some delightfully academic and stiff Thinking Machines Corp. promo videos from Youtube. The first one features some great footage from a lattice gas automata fluid dynamics model (I can’t believe it took a person year for the LGA model, I put one together in a week or so on MATLAB. My ego is pleased.)

Ironically Thinking Machines Corp. went bankcrupt in 1994, when parallel computing is a hot commodity today in 2009.

What would be better application for one dimensional cellular automata than autogenerative electronic music. I know Wolfram Tones offers something along these lines but I set out to experiment on my own first with just the bare rules applied to the chromatic scale. Couple of important rules rendered on the chromatic scale:

http://www.punainen.org/~biotek/rule30.mp3

http://www.punainen.org/~biotek/rule110.mp3

These does seem to hold a eerie quality to them, not that anyone would recognize them as music. Next I cherrypicked a good set of rules which seemed to work nice enough when applied in a random order. I think I used the c major scale for this one.

http://www.students.tut.fi/~heikkara/autobach4002.mp3

That sounds a lot more like music, almost emotional at times. This is a Processing program playing midi notes to a Roland Jx-3p.

Stephen Wolfram and George Johnson on ‘A New Kind Of Science’ (ie. on automata and computation.)

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/8986

Anthony Aguirre and Clifford Johnson chit chat about string theory vs. field theories, coupled with some cosmology.

http://www.bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/22011

Sean Carroll and Mark Trodden from Cosmic Variance blog on the topic of cosmology, dark energy and other interesting issues.

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/21709

Peter Woit and Sabine Hossenfelder on various sociological issues concerning young theoretical physicists.

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/12950