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LISTEN: The Sounds of Chance, Markets, Cancer Cells "Sonification" experts are using sounds and musical tones to improve understanding of complex data, and to help the blind "see" their surroundings. Elsewhere, musicians are listening to the sounds of randomness, and harnessing chance to create new compositions. What do things that aren't sounds sound like? Listen and find out!
A team of scientists from Stanford and Yale is "remapping" data – drawn from oceanographers, stock market prices, solar flares, and colon cell spectroscopes – into sound. By tapping our highly-developed senses of hearing and pattern recognition, people can often detect features that are invisible when we look at the data visually, or comb through the data numerically using statistical techniques. Listen to some of their examples of sonification, and learn more about their team's research
Another group, Seeing with Sound, is experimenting with ways to take visual images of a person's surroundings and translate it into sound. The objective: help blind people become more mobile by drawing on their well-developed ears. Listen to everyday images (and read an explanation of the technology) at Seeing With Sound
Software company GenEffects has created a product for turning stock market data into music. "TickTrola" is intended to "auralize" the market, helping investors detect otherwise hidden patterns. Listen to a demo of Ticktrola, which includes the TickTrola realization of 1987 stock prices (according to the site, "you can hear the market becoming sickly a few days before October 19th, the day of the crash")
What is the sound of one hand flipping (a coin)? Put another way, is there any music in random chance? Yes, but only if randomness is harnessed the right way According to the Nov. 2003 issue of Electronic Musician, "algorithmic composition" uses computerized instructions and processes to determine aspects of a musical work. Now composers and other musical experimenters are finding ways to incorporate chance elements into the mix, letting random numbers make some of the choices. Pure randomness sounds like noise, and in fact is precisely what is known as "white noise." No music there. However, when randomness is used in a structured way but still unpredictable way – for example, fractally, i.e. the way that snowflakes and mountainous terrains are all unique but retain a familiar form –interesting results emerge. Learn more about randomness in music in the Electronic Musician article Explore the software products listed in the article:
Explore the links listed in the article:
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