Kathryn Cramer

My kids meet WolframTones 9/28/05

I did this YouTube video, My Kids Meet WolframTones, about a year ago and it never occurred to me to blog it. But now that everyone is covering their blogs with YouTube videos, perhaps it's time.

               

Here's what I said about it last fall:

After dinner this evening, I sat my son Peter, who has just started 3rd grade, down at my computer and let him play with Wolfram Tones for the first time.  The first interesting thing that happened was that my daughter Elizabeth, who turns 3 in October, started jamming to the WolframTones soundtrack on the toy piano in the living room. (I had gotten the video camera out to film Peter, and she started while I was getting set up.)

After about 10 minutes of fiddling, Peter came up with something he really liked.

How to Put Your Wolfram Tones in Your Sidebar on Typepad

Currently, if you save a bunch of Wolfram Tones, you can go back and listen to them, but if your friends go to the "My Tones" page, they get theirs, not yours. So lets say you want other people to be able to listen to them, and you want this accessible from your blog's sidebar along with the results from your latest Quizilla experience. Here's how you can do it on Typepad:

First, go to Wolfram Tones and create a bunch of compositions which you save as "My Tones." Then, using Typepad, create a Typelist which you might want to call something like "My Wolfram Tones." (You will want to select the "Link" kind of list. This means that you need to go to the Typelist's Configure page and tell it to "Display Notes as Text," but the advantage is that you can specify the number of tones to disply.)

On the My Wolfram Tones page, click on the Modify button on the tone you would like to add to your sidebar.

This will take you to the page for the individual tone. Copy  the URL and then go to your My Wolfram Tones Typelist. Click on Add a New Item. Then paste the URL of your tone into the Box that labeled "Enter a URL to quickly add a new link." This will add your link to the Typelist, but it will come out with the name "Wolfram Tones: Generate a Composition." You want yours to have a better name, something evocative that is going to make your friends want to click there. So call it something like REVENGE OF THE ANDROIDS! and click "Save Changes."

Repeat this process until you've added all the tones you want in your sidebar.

Then, go to the "Edit Current Design" screen for your blog and click on "Change Content Selections." Check the box to add your new Typelist to the sidebar, and then click "Save Changes." This will take you back to the "Edit Current Design" screen. This time, click "Change Ordering" and drag your Wolfram Tones sidebar to where you want it. Then click "Save Changes." And when you are back to the "Edit Current Design" screen, republish your weblog.

Once you've go the Typelist placed, you can add your new Wolfram Tones whenever you want.

Here's a screen shot of my Typelist. How I added the graphics is left as an exercise for the reader.

WolframTones: The Ziporps Gets a Soundtrack

Here's a game for a rainy afternoon: Have your child choose a drawing that the child feels could use a sound track. In this case, my son Peter and I decided he would use a picture he draw a few days ago, a Feel Better Creature he'd drawn for a boy named Ashar in Muzaffarabad:

Peter decided that the creature was called a Ziporps. (If you like Peter's creature, there are many more at petersmonsters.com.)
 

Then go to WolframTones and open up one variety of controls or another an let the child play with it until he or she has a satisfactory soundtrack to go with the drawing. Here is what Peter came up with (and here is a longer version). This is a screen shot of what Peter did to create his composition:

About the soundtrack for his creature, Peter said,

The soundtrack would be perfect for it because the Ziporps goes like the sound of it's tail clenching onto something. The cymbal drum things sound like that. Also he's scuttle-running. His ecosystem is usually either a pond or a river. He's swimming really fast after a bunch of pond fish and ducks. he's trying to figure out where they're going. Because he knows wherever ducks are going, there's food for them and there' s food for him. He eats duck weed and tiny fishes. He's mostly an omnivore. He's a happy creature and he makes people feel better by doing clown stuff and he jumps up on rock ledges and slides down like it was just sand and it looks as if it is moving. That would really amaze someone.

Peter is 8 years old and lives in Pleasantville, NY. He is in the third grade.

Also, if your child would like to draw a picture to make a child in the area affected by the earthquake feel better, upload the picture to Flickr with the tag "earthquakefeelbettercards," and email me and I'll see that the  picture gets where where going. Ashar's dad has agreed to make sure pictures get printed out and given to children they would help.

My Kids Meet Wolfram Tones

Given confidence at my own skills as a cinematographer by a look through the GoogleVideo, I opened my own account and I uploaded this bad little clip I shot on the 28th of September of my kids in their first encounter with Peter Overmann's Wolfram Tones. It took a while for the busy folks at Google Video to approve my clip, but now it has finally been unleashed upon the public.

Back on the 28th,when I first uploaded it, I wrote:

After dinner this evening, I sat my son Peter, who has just started 3rd grade, down at my computer and let him play with Wolfram Tones for the first time. The first interesting thing that happened was that my daughter Elizabeth, who turns 3 in October, started jamming to the Wolfram Tomes soundtrack on the toy piano in the living room. (I had gotten the video camera out to film Peter, and she started while I was getting set up.) After about 10 minutes of fiddling, Peter came up with something he really liked.

I got out the video camera for a kind of personal note-taking to watch how Peter used the program. What happened while I was getting the camera out and turned on, I find quite remarkable: Elizabeth's jamming along with the music coming from the computer is something she usually only does with live music, implying that somehow the music coming from WolframTones passed the Turning test for her.

WolframTones

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: In the midst of all this mess, I got an email from one of the folks at Wolfram telling me about their lovely new Internet widget WolframTones, which is essentially the aesthetics of A New Kind of Science rendered as sound. One of the potentially revolutionary strengths of Mathematica is it's ability to render mathematics as sound, allowing us to gain greater understanding of math using our faculties for appreciating and understanding music. I've been looking into this myself, reading up on the neurology of math. One interesting book on this subject I have in hand is Functional Melodies: Finding Mathematical Relationships in Music by Scott Beall.

But what is special about the Wolfram version, and sets it apart from other attempts to integrate mathematics and music, is that it takes on the gnarly natural mathematics derived from Wolfram's attempt to parse the complexity of the geometry of nature. The piano selections remind me of Philip Glass's "Closing," which I think of as the best Thinking Music I have in my iTunes.