Introduction

Hello! My name is Sachi Barnaby, and I’m a senior majoring in Computer Science and Honors with a minor in Music. I am interested in Human-Computer Interaction research, so this class seemed like a good fit since 3D printing creates opportunity for interaction between the printer and user as well as the printed objects and user.

My chosen project is a site that computationally designs music. Stephen Wolfram created the website to explore new ways of creating music. Wolfram is a scientist who published a book, A New Kind of Science, that details how simple programs can represent complex natural systems, and he has developed the system Mathematica and WolframAlpha.

Here is one example of the music and corresponding visual created on the site.

In this project, Wolfram uses simple rules to create cellular automata (a grid of cells where each cell is either black or white). The rule determines what color each cell will be based on the colors of the cells above. He then took slices of the patterns from the cellular automata to generate music; the height of the black cell translates to the pitch of the note. Using Mathematica, his team took ideas from music theory to process the raw patterns into cohesive scores which are encoded into MIDI audio files (like the one embedded above). The site has been operational since 2005, and now has a variety of interactive elements so that users can customize the kind of music they want to hear. I find this project compelling because of how simple the foundation is for creating much more interesting and complex pieces.