Data Music Project
Data Music Projectis for musical artists, composers and programmers who want create music from data of all kinds.
Inspirations come from time-series (order-preserving transformed into the Midi-Scale) for jazz-oriented Boogies, Blues, Rock,..
I use Excel as a frontend to Win32Forth, which is extended by Midi I/O and graphic functions. Here you see a stock history, mapped into Midi pitches and volume.
If I wanted to hear this kind of music, where would I go? http://fridemar.hypermart.net is down right now.
Additionally I have programmed in Win32For (see ForthLanguage):
This project is uncannily similar to the fictitious piece of software called Anthem described in the novel " DirkGentlysHolisticDetectiveAgency" by DouglasAdams. Now if only the word "fractal" came up somewhere here... (!)
Technically, music is better described by a multifractal than by a plain-old (uni-)fractal. -- StephanHouben
Thank you for the friendly hint to nice inspiring literature (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ts/book-customer-reviews/0671746723/102-6833725-3709661) ;-). Due to the natural laziness (thank you Larry for giving it a positive meaning) of composers, they reuse their material very often on different time scales, i.e. augmentations and diminutions. This conditioning could be one of the reasons, that listeners of music enjoy selfsimilarities in music. On the other hand there are technical analysts that stress selfsimilarities in the chart patterns of the stock market for possibly different reasons.
Since I got the Mac I've been playing around with the demo version of MetaSynth, which does something similar to but subtly different from this. -- KeithBraithwaite
Consider music visualizers (as seen in WinAmp, for instance) as the inverse of this project.
Waxing futuresophic... If in the future the computer experience becomes much more audio based, as it probably will with technologies akin to voice recognition and speech synthesis, then it will become very important to colour the words with more than just intonation. Just like bold and italics, we'll need style for sound. It's conceivable that user interface designers will make use of the human ability to use background music to convey atmosphere. Just like a soundtrack in a movie. Similar technology could be used to provide a better sense of the system state. Consider that when your computer memory runs low, it usually displays a bang box and plays a panic audio clip. However, since the primary channel will be full (the computer will be talking to you), an ominous background score may cleverly convey this information instead. Many games currently have context-sensitive musical scores already. Of course, this would mean that technogeeks would finally have a soundtrack in real life... -- SunirShah
It's certainly been suggested (in more than one place, I think: my brain says SiliconSnakeOil by CliffordStoll, and ThePsychologyOfEverydayThings (aka TheDesignOfEverydayThings) by DonaldNorman) that the various subtle noises made by "old-fashioned" machinery provide lots of useful information about the state of the machinery, and that it's a shame computers don't give similar feedback. These writers aren't thinking of background music, but clicks and hums and buzzes and such. (Because hard discs still aren't completely silent in their operations, we do get a little of this now.) --GarethMcCaughan
If you're really in need of a vacation, you can tell the system state from the electronic hum. (http://www.byte.com/column/BYT20000329S0018)
You could say that CodeSings...
Thank you for your excellent hints and links. Please give me some time to learn DHTML (http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&q=DHTML+%28dynamic+HTML%29) and Java3D (beside my intensive musical activities behind the scenes) to become more compatible with you. Have a look at http://www.3dmidi.com as another inspiring integration of music and graphics.
If someone finds an appropriate WikiWithProgrammableContent (a JavaScriptEnabledWiki as a start, where our stuff is welcome,would suffice) this would be great for a DataMusic Wiki, where the goldrush could start. It would also accelerate learning of each involved Wikizen, myself included -- fridemar
I have a fantasy that goes like this. I collect massive amounts of recent stock market data and through the DataMusicProject find a way to listen to it. Through all the foreground noise and static, I can barely make out, in the background, a song I knew from childhood. Fortunately, I know how that song ends. I then (when tears of nostalgia have subsided enough) use the MusicDataProject? (technology not yet invented) to reverse engineer the end of the song into a set of buy and sell orders. Pretty soon, I'm rich.
Dear WaldenMathews: there is a subtle relation between blues and DataMusic, based on stocks. Its the eternal dialectic between
SeeAlso: DataMusicVoxelApplet
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