Ada into Notes - A Sketch
Created using Dave De Roure's - Numbers into Notes. http://demeter.oerc.ox.ac.uk/NumbersIntoNotes/

Software partly developed as part of the FAST project EPSRC -EP/L019981/1. http://www.semanticaudio.ac.uk

Imported into Live quickly used on three tracks and resampled

Image 
Original Ada Lovelace image from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ada_Lovelace_portrait.jpg

Public Domain

Ada into Notes - A Sketch

The Gift the Algorithm: Beyond Autonomy and Control - Performed by Alan Chamberlain 

This composition and performance grew out of a historical thought experiment. Ada Lovelace had written about Charles Babbage’s analytical engine – a design for a general purpose computer that was never built – and speculated that "the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”.  She also wrote "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” Originally we used a simulator of the analytical engine for humans to generate and select algorithmic music fragments, then a web app to make this more widely available. This performance extended the experiment by putting the human in control of a machine as it assembled multiple contributed fragments.

Performed at Oxford House, London, UK, 25/8/2017
Accepted as a performance at Audio Mostly 2017
Image by Pip Willcox

The Gift the Algorithm: Beyond Autonomy and Control (Live)

As well as a programmer and mathematician, Ada Lovelace was a keen musician.  And amidst the many great minds of the 19th century, it was Lovelace who saw the potential of the computer beyond calculation, and contemplated its relationship with human creativity. In 1843 she wrote of Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine: 

"Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."

Since the symposium "Celebrating 200 years of a Computer Visionary" in December 2015, we have been generating music using nineteenth century mathematics and simulations of the Analytical Engine. 

Here is a demo piece, a small contribution to Ada Lovelace Day 2018, based on a Fibonacci sequence and arranged for a harp - an instrument which Lovelace played with great dedication.

The Fib 12 sequence was generated using numbersintonotes.net (Fibonacci mod 12 i.e. 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 1 9 10 7 5 0 5 5 10 3 1 4 5 9 2 11 1, mapped to C major) to create a fragment which is assembled with itself at different times, tempos, and retrograde. This arrangement is designed to illustrate various kinds of fragment assembly - like a machine or automaton which reveals the melody of the maths.

The score is available here https://www.dropbox.com/s/91e6ipxk3meuhaq/Fib12LovelaceDay2018.pdf

See also our 2016 live performance using algorithmically generated fragments https://soundcloud.com/alain_du_norde/the-gift-the-algorithm-beyond-autonomy-and-control

Fancy some Fibonacci jazz?  This is the Fib 35 piece we played at the Symposium in 2015 https://soundcloud.com/david-de-roure/fib35

With special thanks to composer Emily Howard for the "Numbers into Notes" idea, originally presented in performances of "Ada sketches". 

Fib 12 by David De Roure is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This work was funded by the EPSRC FAST Project EP/L019981/1 and released 9th October 2018.

Fib 12 Ada Lovelace Day 2018

Jazz example used at the Ada Lovelace Symposium in Oxford, December 2015 - Celebrating 200 Years of a Computer Visionary.

This piece is based on a Fibonacci Sequence modulo 35. The sequence was generated using the Fourmilab simulator of Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine, available on https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/

Fib 35 by David De Roure is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This research was supported by Transforming Musicology, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under grant AH/L006820/1 in the Digital Transformations programme, and by Fusing Semantic and Audio Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant number EP/L019981/1. Released 10th December 2015.

Fib35

Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies (FAST) project http://www.semanticaudio.ac.uk/

Fib 12 Ada Lovelace Day 2018

David De Roure

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