25 May
2010
25 May
'10
11:21 p.m.
On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 1:33 PM, Chris Cannam
<cannam(a)all-day-breakfast.com> wrote:
I think the point Neils has is just that the outcome
of your noodling
is somewhat independent of your explicit intention. Notes that sound
satisfying together are probably going to sound satisfying largely
because of some intrinsic mathematical relationship, or at least
something that is probably open to analysis to some extent but that
you don't yourself understand or plan.
testify(wordUp); /*Chris, thanks for clarifying my point!*/
Consider how the snowflake, the mountain, coastlines, leaves and
trees, whose shapes "put the cart before the horse" of the mathematics
of fractals: http://www.ams.org/notices/201001/rtx100100010p.pdf (the
most mind-blowing AMS paper i've read so far: is DNA and life itself
"shaped" fractally in the same way time and erosion sculpts a
mountain?).
nature "put the cart before the horse" of analog
synthesizers/computers when it made the sounds in the link below,
without ever conceiving of operational-amplifiers:
http://boingboing.net/2010/01/17/cracking-ice-sheets.html
Last time I was thinking about this in public, I said:
The other thing that would be interesting is to
explore the
intersection between fractal self-similarities and rhythm/melody. Is
music, and that which sounds musical "fractal" in nature, much like
when we see something and instantly identify "tree" or "mountain" or
"coastline" because of their fractal nature? Do we appreciate when
music is more fractal, versus being a kind of latticework, infinite
pattern, or just a random potpourri of sounds strung together for no
purpose?
Niels
http://nielsmayer.com