For an amusing connection between math and music, tune in the new site Wolfram-Tones. Orchestrated by the company Wolfram Research of Champaign, Illinois, the site plays compositions based on cellular automata: complex geometrical patterns that arise from simple rules relating the color of a particular square to the colors of its neighbors. A section from one of these diagrams can serve as a musical score, in which the height of each square indicates the pitch of the note. The site lets you cue up songs in genres from hip-hop to country to Latin, or assign different instruments. You can also play around with the underlying math by altering the rule that generated the pattern.
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23 April 2021
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