The Perl Journal March 2003
I was a band geek in high school. That's right—I played trombone. Every Saturday during autumn, I dressed up in a silly green-and-gold uniform, complete with a gold feather in the cap, and marched onto the football field with a hundred other ridiculously dressed, like-minded aficionados and played my heart out.
In retrospect, I didn't really understand at the time the way music intersects with other disciplines, which might explain why I stopped playing by the time I got to college. Music is a science, as much as anything else, and at its core it is mathematics. If I'd known that, well, things might have been different. Nevertheless, I loved math and science. Still do.
Which is why I find Randy Kobes's article "Fractal Images and Music with Perl" in this issue so fascinating. If you've never listened to fractal music before, give Randy's code a try. Here, we see the direct link from mathematical formula to musical score. But does it sound good? Is it really music? I confess, I expected the answer to be "no"—but I was wrong. Fractal generators are capable of making some surprisingly beautiful arrangements. As Randy admits in the article, it does still require a certain amount of human inspiration to seed the process with the right values. But the degree to which the formulas take over and make music is astonishing.
Fractals also describe—if not govern—some of the basic processes of nature. From leaves to mollusk shells, the concept of self-similarity at different scales seems to be one of nature's more efficient means of encoding the instructions for life. Perhaps for this reason, fractals are particularly good at modeling the biological world. What is more surprising is that the geological world also seems to exhibit a fractal nature—this can easily be seen by looking at an aerial photo of a coastline.
This all just reinforces the idea that algorithms underlie much of the world around us. Algorithms form the intersections between disciplines that we wouldn't normally connect, like music and biology. For some, it's these intersections that make the world interesting. They give us a bridge between disciplines and hint at the possibility that there's a real system governing it all. I spent hours as a kid poring over those "How Things Work" books. I had a shelf full of them, and I think the attraction for me was seeing the clockwork behind familiar things. That's what made me love science.
I've recently started making music again. No, not with a trombone (for which my neighbors are thankful), but with a synthesizer and computer. I won't be quitting my day job anytime soon, but what I'm finding is that the reason I care about it now, when for so many years I didn't, is that now I see some of the clockwork behind the music.
Kevin Carlson
Executive Editor
The Perl Journal