MetaFilter posts tagged with tones

What language is music?

univac — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:52:25 -0800

Western musical intervals are derived from speech tendencies, according to Duke scientists. Specifically, "most of the 12 chromatic scale intervals correspond to peaks of relative power in the normalized spectrum of human vocalizations." A somewhat more layperson-friendly summary of the study is here. Some think that language and musicality evolved in tandem (see the singing Neanderthals), and Mendelssohn thought that the communicative ability of music is even more precise than that of language (as related by Oliver Sacks, at 9:05 - .mp3 link).

Integrals!

Upton O'Good — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:35:43 -0800

The Integrator is Mathematica's integration capabilities, available over the web. Other online resources from Wolfram include Tones, an automatic music generator, and the venerable Mathworld, an extensive collection of math terms and theorems. (which, yes, has been mentioned previously.)

The hills (and everything else) are alive...

2or3whiskeysodas — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:43:09 -0800

The idea of treating everyday, ambient noise as music is not terribly new, but Noah Vawter's device turns ambient sounds into music (in a somewhat more traditional sense of the word):

Ambient Addition is a Walkman with binaural microphones. A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes the microphone's sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener's world.