This article was taken from the March 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Underlying any tune is a geometry that makes music sound, well... musical. "I wanted to create interactive devices that would let me play with these rules, and bring the theory to life," says coder and designer Luisa Pereira, a research fellow in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. So she created three music sequencers -- The Counterpointer, El Ordenador and La Mecánica; physical interfaces that let you make music based on rules.
After entering a sequence of eight notes into The Counterpointer, Pereira's software runs through thousands of melodies to generate soprano and bass voices to the alto input, using the harmonic rules of counterpoint developed during the Renaissance.
Similarly, El Ordenador is governed by three modern rules of music that Uruguay-born Pereira found in a book called A Geometry of Music. "So I start with a chaotic noise that doesn't sound like music at all, and then I turn one switch on and it starts to sound more harmonic, and then another switch makes it more melodic -- and if you turn them all on, it sounds like actual music. I'd love to hear what real musicians could do with it."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
