Music By Numbers
The relationship between music and mathematics is an intimate one, and can be explored by moving from one to the other in either direction. A recent app allows users to transform those distinctly unnatural but ubiquitous patterns – barcodes – into music…
Music From The Machine
The Dutch media artist Leo Van Der Veen has created the Barcodas iPhone app,which allows you to scan any standard EAN or UPC product barcode and derive a musical phrase from it.
Once you’ve scanned your barcode, you can manipulate the data in a variety of ways to modify your musical snippet, all through a very simple and user-friendly interface. It looks like this could be a life-saver for musicians regularly roped in to unwanted shopping expeditions… with plenty of source material to peruse, department store rummaging could unearth some tuneful gems.
Feeding The Number Cruncher
If you prefer to define your own inputs, then the freeware PC program MusiNum might be more to your liking. This creates music from numbers in a very direct sense. Lars Kindermann, the creator, describes it as “a free sonification program which turns numbers into generative fractal music.” You can feed it any series of numbers – such as the multiples of 5 – and it will apply its algorithm to generating a musical output for you…