Kevin Thies – Looking Outwards 11

A user’s generated music

While looking at various computational instruments, I ended up on a small tangent that lead to the discovery of not a person, but a tool. Specifically, that tool was WolframTones, created 2005 by Wolfram Research, based on research from the 1980s. I found it interesting in that unlike what I looked at during week 4, this was a tool that was more centered around what I suppose you could call the formality of music. It allows for control over tempo, pitch mapping, and instrumentation. As an extra blessing or curse, the site had so many different options that one could really engross themselves. There are already hundreds of premade musical scales, instruments, and instrument roles. It’s crazy.
WolframTones is powered by Wolfram Automata. Basically, there’s a square that’s either black or white and it’ll gontinue to grow based on a specific rule, generating complexity. There are 256 rules, and Stephen Wolfram’s experiment went through all those rules. Hopefully this image explains it a little better.

WolframTones takes these rules and flips them sideways, and uses them as notes.
The above video is an example of someone using the website and their generated music.