Music is Math

I am certainly not the first to espouse this idea but I am a really big fan nonetheless. Music is really just a bunch of numbers - a sequence - with meta data attached to those numbers. Not unlike HTML.

Many people have written about this for years, but Stephen Wolfram has taken it one step further: WolframTones. His 2002 book A New Kind of Science broke new ground in scientific thinking and this site does the same for...ringtones. Yes, ringtones. Not everyone agrees with Wolfram - he does have a tendency to "toot his own horn."

WolframTones is a site that allows users to create their own - potentially unique - ringtones based on instrumentation, tempo, scales and other parameters. These parameters are then mapped to an equation or numerical value which generates the sequence of data - and the ringtone. You can hear the one I created here.

PLEASE NOTE: you will need to have a polyphonic-capable phone that can receive email and has web access. Any camera phone these days should work (check the site for the phone test).


Full credit goes to Slashdot for clueing me in to this site.

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