[eu-gene] WolframTones (generative music)

[Jelle Herold]

Hi Joost and Lauri,

Quoting Joost Rekveld (lists at lumen.nu):
> hmm, a quick websaerch turns up this:
> http://comp.uark.edu/~dmillen/cam.html
> which is 17 years old.
>
> I would suppose there has been cellular automata music around since
> the end of the seventies, since composers tend to be very early
> adapting these kinds of structures..  A wild guess, uninformed as to
> specific projects, but I do know several people who have been using
> cellular automata for music for years and years and years, and they
> don't claim to be doing something new...
> 
> I guess what's annoying about Wolfram is the fact that there is no
> credit whatsoever for precursors, but perhaps even these people are
> not aware of them ?  I've understood that the same criticism holds
> for parts of his book: he does not always credit people who did
> similar things before him.
> 
> On the other hand what is great about the Wolfram endeavor is that
> he makes tons of interesting ideas available to a wide audience,
> including this one.  And I guess if the site is labelled   'a new
> kind of music', that must be true for about 99.9% of the people
> visiting it...

yes, there are many such systems in existence. The nice thing about
this one is, like you said, that it brings this kind of CA based
composing to a wide audience: runs in a browser, looks fancy and you
can email links of generated tracks to you friends.

Other, less mainstream (CA) generative audio applications are by far
more advanced and better suited for "real" compositional work.

So, I completely agree with you on the Wolfram issue. He is probably
using this as a promotional tool, trying to sell more copies of his
book or the Mathematica software.

Jelle.
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