Mathematical Musical Language for Spontaneity
Contents |
An idea
It's like this:
1. Explore the production of musical material using mathematical functions. I imagine stuff that continues in an ever changing way but carries the character of a particular function or math thing.
2. Get a band to work on this material and learn it. Keep learning more but always having in mind which family or function or whatever it is related to. You could identify different math sound things with different colours or shapes for example, in order that each develops its own identity in the minds of the musicians.
3. The idea is that by having learnt or worked with a lot of material which carries a particular character, the musicians have a common and unique understanding of sounds, and that that provides the possibility to improvise together in a different way. It could also be used in Rubber Band to give directions for a composition.(Play blue 5 to begin until I start singing. Switch to red 1. I sing two long lines, then a gap, then I repeat them over red 2. Play Yellow square for the chorus... etc...)
Questions
- What type of mathematical processes could be applied to create such material?
A Similar Idea - but with computer help!
In the interest of Intellectual Property it should be pointed out that this idea formed from a discussion with _MiW_
All music is sound. All sound can be expresses as waves. Mathematics can model most (if not all) waves. Therefore most (if not all) music can be expressed as a series or set of mathematical functions.
With this it mind, as well given that programs exist to generate noise from math functions, it is proposed that a fun thing to do would be to get some noise-generating programs where you can tweak the math functions directly & MAKE SUM NOIZZZEE YEAH!!!
This could link with the above idea if a musician playing a traditional instrument 'jammed' with a musician using computer-generated noise. The computer could be used to mimic the sound of a 'real' instrument & hence a function (or set of functions) would be correlated to the live 'real' instrument. However this process itself may be redundant for if a computer generated sound already exists for a particular instrument, mimicking it would be a waste of time cos you could just download the sound anyways.
As well as individual noises or sounds of instruments being mimicked, songs themselves have an obvious pattern or structure. We think math could be used to automatically generate these structures, messing with chord loops to get a verse-chorus-bridge thang goin on.
Music in the Mathematics Classroom
Each particular mathematical function will have (has?) a characteristic sound, so that a student could be taught how the visual representation of a function relates to an aural representation of a function. For example, a sine wave is like an ambulance siren. Using only algebraic symbols & graphs to represent functions was all fine & dandy back before silicon chips & such - but we live in the 21st century, damnit! We have the computing power to generate the sounds as quickly as, if not quicker than, a graph can be drawn by hand.
Given that people learn in different ways this additional media tool used to explain mathematics could do wonders to increasing the overall understanding of all those wanky numbers n stuff.
