A mathmatical equation for music?

I don't know much about math either, but I had a friend who had some ideas about a mathematical equation for music. Real interesting stuff, too bad he just got a job at Starbucks instead!

its sad what i can't remember. this is a summation equation i think and it generates waveforms, but not music, i think. which doesn' really tell you anything. sorry

Here's a site to generate some avant fun. Change some of the numbers or letters then hit mutate. Then click on the pattern created to hear your creation. I would have at least 2 for the # of tracks. You can also change the numbers around in the transformations section.

http://nosuchmedia.com/music/expresso.cgi

He photographed an equation, he didnt make it up himself.

i'm amazed taht i didn't notice the frame around that equation. mathematical photography????? can you even call it that?

scientists will never ever ever ever respect artists now.

Hoho. That is complete bollocks. It's a Fourier transform, which is a way of expressing a complicated waveform as the (infinite) sum of a series of simpler waverforms. It's first year university maths. It's used in acoustics, yes, but also electronics, optics, data analysis, pretty much everywhere in engineering and physics.

It has something to do with music in the same way that a thesaurus has something to do with the Bible.

It's just a Fourier Transform.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FourierTransform.html

(See equation (5).)

It is the basis for signal processing and has applications in audio engineering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform

uh...yeah. What he said :)

I hope Mullins is getting very rich passing off this trivia and voodoo as profound. The Gödel's Theorem one in particular makes me very angry. According to his blurb, 'The philosophical implications of this are hotly debated'. He forgot to add, 'by lunatics and cranks on the internet, but not by people who actually understand it'.

Other bollocks: 'Unfettered by the restrictions of space, entanglement may be the ghostly bedrock upon which reality is built'.

Luminosity is the most facile equation, equivalent to saying 'the total number of years the Rolling Stones have been alive is their average age mulitplied by the number of people in the band'.

Also, the typography is appalling. It looks like it was done in Word, which is to equations as shotgun is to face. Note in particular the double dots above the capital letters on the three body problem, and the absence of hair spaces in the brackets in the Gödel's theorem one.

In d(band)/d(dozen) + ILM = Constant (chatter)

uummm....like wow...I just kinda liked it...who'd a thought it would of caused such vitriol?

interesting point about the typography though - i would never have thought of that and i guess he didn't either. i suppose as only a tiny tiny percentage of people have the faintest idea why the absence of hair spaces (whatever they are!) would matter he probably let it go. What do you use to write equations instead of word? Is there a better equation? One that someone who took two attempts at getting his maths 'o' level might understand?

I still like the way it looks.

He picks some fine tshirt equations (Euler's, Maxwell's) and some interestingly left-field ones that don't get this kind of tshirt love too often (three body, Jeans, Lagrange's). It's not these choices I object to.

It's the write-ups beneath, which are either willfully designed to obfuscate and misinterpret the equations' meanings in order to dazzle non-technical people into thinking they're more human and profound than they are--or they're just silly, facile metaphors.

I don't think it's too much to ask that he get spacing and alignment and font choice (Times New Roman -- ick) right if he's going to blow them up to 50cm x 80cm. Pretty much 100% of mathematical documents are written in a language called TeX, which is not too disimilar to HTML. They choose TeX because it takes care of typsetting the maths (which, to be fair to Word, is extremely hard) so you don't have to worry about dots above qs in the Lagrangian equation overlapping the q (and other such mistakes Word is happy to make). TeX is free.

Don't mind me though. I do the maths for a living and worry about typography for a hobby, so he's pressed all my buttons. If you find them attractive then they've done a better job than I do of getting people interested in my day job. Fair play to him.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommend 'It Must Be Beautiful' edited by Graham Farmelo (of London Review of Books fame), which explains six beautiful equations.

That looks like a great read - thanks for the recommendation. I'm putting my order in.

Yay! Keep an eye out for the fantastic Philip Larkin quote in the introduction.

Mullins is a fucking joke. Excuse me, I'm off to dig out some of my old problem sets and sell them as art.

*math is hard* -> TEH ART

??????????

*The Gödel's Theorem one in particular makes me very angry. According to his blurb, 'The philosophical implications of this are hotly debated'. He forgot to add, 'by lunatics and cranks on the internet, but not by people who actually understand it'.*

That may be true, but I remember reading a fabulous book many years ago about the philosophy of goedel's theorem by douglas hofstadter and dan dennett: Godel, Esher, Bach.

i read this b/c of the thread beneath it as: a mathmatical equation you could watch for 3 hours!

i'd put it on a wall of my room cuz it looks damn cool, whatever it means

albertE: that is true, but GEB is a carefully written, subtle book (like the theorem, which is frankly a result of minimal importance to mathematicians despite what the internet tells us). It is not tshirt friendly.