Algorithmic Music

Algorithmic music

The use of mathematics in music is faschinating. I have compiled an album with different tracks using various mathematical algorithms.


Listen to the the album Algorythmic on Bandcamp:
  

Entanglement

I find the implementation of weakly coupling of oscillators fascinating as you go from a simple mathematical description to something complex as biology and chaos.  Entanglement is about weakly interacting oscillators. You see it all the time, but you are not aware of it. Fireflies blinking in the same speed. people clapping synchronized at the end of a show. Even the cells in your beating heart is synchronized. The following piece of music is consisting of 6 weakly interacting oscillators. Slowly they drift apart, leaving the initial perfect synchronization.

Osc12 - The synchronization of Oscillators [2011]

The usage of this in a music wise interpretation is  exploited further by the Drop Machine. Here is a track written in MAX/MSP simulating oscillators getting out of synchronization.


Experiments with Strange Attractors.

Peter De Jong

This attractor is marking the surface of a fractal boundary. It is a discrete two dimensional fractal, solving the following iterative equations:


The points are plotted in a two dimensional system and an the sounds are created by applying an inverse Fourier Transformation on a predefined column.


Peter de Jong Equations and experimenting harnessing a 5 oscillators on the modular system. Here is an interesting result.





Tinkerbell Attractor

The Tinkerbell attractor creates a pattern much like Tinkerbells flying pattern in the old Disney Movies. It is a relatively simple equation and here I have wrapped the points upon the surface of a sphere.


where a = 0.3, b = 0.6000, c =2, d = 0.27.

The map shows a chaotic but periodic system. The points jump around in an predictable system creating a repeatable, though slowly changing melody pattern




Lorenz Attractor

The Lorenz attractor is probably the most famous of all attractors. It is a set of  ordinary differential equations in three dimensional space that shows chaotic behavior, depending on the initial conditions and parameters. The mathematics behind the attractor was developen in 1963 by Edward Lorenz. He developted the equations to describe atmospheric flow. The quation system in the equation system describes the transport of air in a finite box that is heated up from below.


On top of the attractor, a simple chaotic beat is added to the sounds. This beat is a set of weakly coupled oscillators and it creates a slowly developing rhythm.






Cellular Mata [2012]

Game of Life is an primitive algorithm for simulation of bacteria growth. Here is a short fun made with Max/MSP and Jitter.





Imaginary Circles

Imaginary Circles II - Music with Doepfer modular synth [2012]