Wolfram Science

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.)

Stephen Wolfram's Keynote Address: "The core of NKS is exploring the computational universe."

Posted by Kathryn Cramer.

Stephen Wolfram gave a wide-ranging Keynote Address that touched on many (or perhaps even all) of the subjects of the papers to be presented at the conference.

The central organizing metaphor of the talk was the field of NKS as an exploration of the computational universe: The core of NKS is exploring the computational universe.

My favorite line from the talk, from the portion in which he discussed NKS and aesthetics is: We are seeing the beauty of nature but not just from our world, but from all possible worlds.

As I was listening to his talk I explored the relationship between the various items on the program today. Here is my first draft version of this. As I listen to the talks I will modify and improve upon this.

Larger versions of the graphic are available here: 1024 x 642 and 3869 x 2424.

The talk will be available later. We will post the URL when we have it.