The mathematician composed “the most unpleasant music in the world”
Mathematician Scott Rickard (Scott Rickard) tried to do what no musician has ever tried - namely, to compose the most nasty melody. In this way, the scientist wanted to illustrate the thesis that the harmony of music lies in mathematical patterns, that is, in repetitions.
Making music without patterns is harder than it sounds. Strictly speaking, this is generally impossible, because the existence of a structure consisting of a limited number of elements (such as musical notes), with a guaranteed absence of patterns, contradicts the Ramsey theorem and the Van der Waerden theorem . However, Ricard is very familiar with combinatorics, and he set another goal - to get rid of patterns that can be mathematically found at the current level of computer technology. The human brain is also unable to recognize these patterns and, therefore, cannot find anything in the music that can “please”.
Scott Ricard used the Galois fields, based on which frequencies similar to sonar pings were generated (sounds that the sonar receives during echolocation). The frequencies were converted into an array of Kostas 88x88, which corresponds to a piano range (88 keys) and started to play along the Golomb ruler , that is, without repeating intervals. To find patterns in such a structure, you need to find the Kostas array of 88x88 in size, which seems impossible in the near future using the bruteforce method.
Arnold Schoenberg , a famous composer, founder of a new Viennese school, tried to write music without repetitions about 70 years ago. His music really looked like a sound generator from the Kostas array, but Schoenberg didn’t have a mathematical education, and it wouldn’t help him in the 1940s because John Costas published his work in 1965.
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What happened with Ricarda - see the video from TEDxMIA.
Scott Ricard received a degree in mathematics, computer science and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, defended his PhD (PhD) in applied and computational mathematics in Princeton. Now he has founded the department of complex and adaptive systems at the University College Dublin, where he gathers specialists from various fields of science (biology, mathematics, computer science, geology, economics, etc.) to work on socially important problems.
Making music without patterns is harder than it sounds. Strictly speaking, this is generally impossible, because the existence of a structure consisting of a limited number of elements (such as musical notes), with a guaranteed absence of patterns, contradicts the Ramsey theorem and the Van der Waerden theorem . However, Ricard is very familiar with combinatorics, and he set another goal - to get rid of patterns that can be mathematically found at the current level of computer technology. The human brain is also unable to recognize these patterns and, therefore, cannot find anything in the music that can “please”.
Scott Ricard used the Galois fields, based on which frequencies similar to sonar pings were generated (sounds that the sonar receives during echolocation). The frequencies were converted into an array of Kostas 88x88, which corresponds to a piano range (88 keys) and started to play along the Golomb ruler , that is, without repeating intervals. To find patterns in such a structure, you need to find the Kostas array of 88x88 in size, which seems impossible in the near future using the bruteforce method.
Arnold Schoenberg , a famous composer, founder of a new Viennese school, tried to write music without repetitions about 70 years ago. His music really looked like a sound generator from the Kostas array, but Schoenberg didn’t have a mathematical education, and it wouldn’t help him in the 1940s because John Costas published his work in 1965.
')
What happened with Ricarda - see the video from TEDxMIA.
Scott Ricard received a degree in mathematics, computer science and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, defended his PhD (PhD) in applied and computational mathematics in Princeton. Now he has founded the department of complex and adaptive systems at the University College Dublin, where he gathers specialists from various fields of science (biology, mathematics, computer science, geology, economics, etc.) to work on socially important problems.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/132010/
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