This is the first post (and, I hope, the last one) I will write in English. Why? Because that I am very upset about something I heard recently, and I would like some people to be aware of this.
Of course, most of them would not give a damn about my anger, but still...
The cause of my wrath is a podcast by Samuel Hansen, concretely the episode "The Score" of his Kickstarter-funded "Relatively Prime" show. Such episode features Scott Rickard (of the "Costas-arrays-turned-to-music" fame) and Robert Schneider.
Hansen says that Rickard applied mathematics to music "in a way that [he] sincerely doubt[s] any musician would though about". Perhaps the notion of playing only once the 88 notes of a piano such that no repetition of intervals occurs is novel for musicians, but Rickard's idea concerning the so-called "lack of symmetries" in order to produce an "ugly" musical piece is rather silly. I am convinced that "ugliness" in music is more about being boring or incomprehensible, and that is precisely the point that Mozart tried to make (and successfully, in my opinion) with his "Ein musikalischer Spaß". Thus, musicians are rather aware of how to produce ugly results, and the quest for beauty is precisely the interesting (and mathematical!) problem of this (and every) art.
The redeeming aspect of this contribution is that Costas arrays are rather interesting mathematical objects, and I learned about them because of this lame attempt to produce unpleasant music (as I already mentioned in an earlier post). At this point I was just angry.
But then I hear Schneider with his almost unintelligible speech about issues that learned musicians (and certainly I do not count as one) have been aware for centuries: the harmony of small ratios and the many problems that the scales derived from them have. Of course this "pure" ratios have very exciting properties! And certainly they have been explored extensively! And it is rather easy to waste them in a rather boring song. The compromise of equal temperament (that is not due to Bach, by the way) and the wonderful contributions by other geniuses of mathematics and music such as Vincenzo Galilei, Simon Stevin and Marin Mersenne are not mentioned and, in my opinion, they are also miserably looked down on in these kind of discussions. If you accept equal temperament (or tunings that behave similarly), then you can concentrate less in "sounding good" and more in abstract structure, which I deem as a superior discovery within music.
After all this I had no remaining patience to hear about "algorithmic" music, so I stop here.
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