Silicon Insider: Sweet Music From a Simple Theory
Sept. 15, 2005 — -- Want to see and hear something very cool? Check out this Web site: http://tones.wolfram.com/generate/.
Pick a style of music and press the button. If you want, mess with the pitch or the choice of instruments or the time signature. Interesting, isn't it? The music is amazingly complex, not the kind of stuff you would hear from a standard music generator. There is a randomness here, but at the same time, a structure -- listen to the melodies emerge in the classical music, the riffs in the rock 'n' roll -- the kind of music that suggests an intelligence has had a hand in the composition.
And yet, if you read the accompanying explanation, you'll discover that all the music you are hearing -- and you can generate literally billions of tunes, enough to fill a lifetime of continuous listening -- is being generated automatically (literally) by a computer using a handful of simple rules.
How is that possible? Well, therein lies a tale …
You may remember the name Stephen Wolfram. There was a flurry of press coverage about him three years ago when he published his magnum opus, "A New Kind of Science." The book, and the 10 years of secret research it described, was to be Wolfram's equivalent of Isaac Newton's "Principia," a scientific breakthrough so profound that it would turn our established model of the universe on its head, and send generations of young graduates racing off to spin out all of its implications.
"A New Kind of Science" would also, as a side benefit, finally enable Wolfram to answer the question: Why had the most promising young mathematician and physicist of his era -- the kid who had published his first scientific paper at 15, who had dazzled his professors at Oxford and earned his doctorate in theoretical physics from CalTech at 20, and had been, at 21, the youngest-ever MacArthur "Genius" Prize recipient -- suddenly left academia and "sold out" to the corporate world?
Not that Wolfram was a failure in the business world. On the contrary, he was a raging success. He founded Wolfram Research, which packaged his extraordinary software program, "Mathematica," that enabled users to instantly convert any mathematical equation into a geometric image on the computer screen, and vice versa.
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