From Mathematica to live performance: Mapping simple programs to music

Abstract

This paper focuses on selected simple programs used to model generative processes for basic elements of music material such as rhythm, pitch and texture, as well as large-scale works of music. After presenting decisions on sound mapping procedures, I'll introduce the system NKM, A New Kind of Music, designed by Peter Overmann, director of software technology for the Mathematica programming environment. NKM is a system controlled by cellular automata (CA), modeling a number of processes in nature. The CA presented in the paper belong to a group of elementary rules that encapsulate four classes of complexity, from simple to universally complex, conceived by Stephen Wolfram and presented in his book A New Kind of Science. All of the examples were generated in Mathematica, the software by Wolfram Research Inc. Mathematical basis for the examples can be found in the book A New Kind of Science. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.