Premiered and recorded on 22/4/2015 by the RNCM Brand New Orchestra, conducted by Jan Wiersche.

Against The Tide

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

Dr. Sam Salem is PRiSM Lecturer in Composition. This sound clip accompanies a piece written for PRiSM Future Music #2, held on June 15 2020 'A Psychogeography of Latent Space'. 

The piece is an artistic reflection on composition in the age of Machine Learning, written to accompany the public launch of PRiSM SampleRNN, a collaboration between Dr. Christopher Melen and Dr. Sam Salem.

The article can be found at https://www.rncm.ac.uk/research/research-centres-rncm/prism/prism-news/future-music-2/

This is part of PRiSM Future Music #2, held on June 15 2020. A day of new releases of text and performance exploring AI and Creativity. 

PRiSM is the RNCM Centre for Practice & Research in Science and Music.

Lobster Telephone -epoch122 T08 12

RNCM PRiSM

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