Wolfram Science

Wendy Cox: Paradoxical Appropriations

Engineering and Design lecture series

Wendy Cox of Norwich University discusses architecture and NKS

Wendy describes the paradoxes present between architecture and nature, and how their presence led her to connect architecture with NKS. She showed several examples of interactive and dynamic buildings and structures, as well as many pieces of art that illustrated the points of her discussion.

Since architecture typically serves to create a particular solution for a particular problem, one application of NKS is to produce more general models that can be modified to suit a particular problem. Wendy described her work designing NKS branching structures, which on one scale could produce meshes to serve as the facade of a building, and at another scale even as the layout of a city.

Generating Music with NKS: From Mathematica to a Live Performance by Katarina Milkovic, New England Conservatory of Music

Posted by Kathryn Cramer.

Katarina Milkovic showed a number of NKS patterns and described how she had transformed them into sound and played the sound compositions. She discussed the various things that were tried in 2004 when at NKS Summer School.

NKS Music - Katarina Miljkovic

• Rule 118
• Rule 30
• Rule 110
• Sound Synthesis Rule 30
• Sounds from NKS: Class 2
• Sounds from NKS: Class 2 - 3
• Sounds from NKS: Class 4
• Awakening, for Violin & Piano, Rule 30

 

In between the presentations there was an interesting discussion involving John Kiehl and others concerning the differences in the situation of Milkovic as a classically trained composer working towards NKS music as opposed to the situation of the people at Wolfram working from software towards NKS music.

Peter Overmann demonstrated the WolframTones site and showed us the various stages of developing WolframTones in Mathematica, showing how they built up to the system of WolframTones as it exists now.

Following the presentations, the question and answer session took the form of a group discussion of aesthetics.

(The blog post I showed involving the WolframTone my son created to go with a drawing he made is here: WolframTones: The Ziporps Gets a Soundtrack.)

Three books to be read in this order

A while after the Artistic NKS panel, I was having a conversation with several of the presenters about the synethetic aspects of Luke Dubois's presentation. I asked Luke whether he had read Richard Cytowic's book on synethesia, which I quite like. We got onto the subject of other pop neurology books, and I said I recommended a group of three books that should be read in order, because they had had a significant impact on my thinking, but what I  got out of them is an argument that emerges partly from the sequence. They said I should write this down and post it to the blog, so here I am.

These are the books:

Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (2001)  by George Lakoff & Raphael Nunez which discusses the mathaphorical substructure of how the brain does math. It refers frequently to The Number Sense : How the Mind Creates Mathematics by Stanislas Dehaene. In The Number Sense, Dehaene is very dismissive of mathematical prodigies and argues that pretty much everything they can do is explainable through the techniques of the Classical Art of Memory. So I read Frances Yates's book The Art of Memory which discusses in detail what is known about the techniques for using memory palances and other pneumonics.

And then Hurricane Katrina happened, and looking at the news coverage I instantly understood that the news media were covering it wrong, because those interested in knowing about it have their own individual; idiosycharatic maps of New Orleans in their head, and so that it was inadequate to show that someone's house somewhere was beging destroyed. People wanted to know where the images came from specifically. Where exactly were the levee breaks. And they wanted some mechanism for understanding the depth of the flooding in areas important to them.

This has led me down a long path having to do with developing approaches to disasters and other wildcaught problems. I've had a pretty wild last 9 months because of where these books lead me.

(Others wishing to make reading recommendations can submit them to me at kathryn dot cramer at gmail dot com.)