At some point in recent history someone thought Baby Einstein was a good idea. A torrent of bright colorful video and classical sounds to soothe babies into a trance? I have doubts whether this actually works.
I think it is just a way for parents to let the tv babysit their kids under the cover of ‘they are learning.’
But the idea has some kind of basis. Isnt music, inherently linked to intelligence some how? The ability to read music notes for example is could be considered as a mathematical skill. For example, Beethoven was deaf. He did not need to hear the notes, he knew the measure the notes and pitches to create a composition to stand the test of time.
So I wonder. What about modern day music? composed through what could be considered simply elevated or abstracted math, implemented as software? Music is hardly analog anymore, laden with frequency generators, fast fourier transforms, memory management and stream processing. Could the musicians of today be software engineers at heart?
Consider EDM, Electronic Dance Music, genre of music. It is a world of composers and musicians generating addictive tracks only needing a laptop and maybe a microphone for sampling. Listen to this remixed track: http://soundcloud.com/inrvisn/tiesto-work-hard-play-hard. It is a track remixed by an artist named Inrvisn, with music from an international superstar Tiesto.
To the unappreciative ear it sounds like noise. To me Jazz was the same way, after taking a Jazz Appreciation class I have learned to like it. To other generations Rock and Roll was noise too. Soon the blips and bloops, sawtooth notes, the looped fade ins and fade outs, deep bass notes for me reverberate an inner cavity of energy that makes me nod and bop to the beat.
Interestingly for me, I notice other effects as well. I begin to focus more, new ideas pop out of nowhere, and I make inferences from unlike ideas very quickly. Its like the music serves as entropy for this complex mass of brain matter. Maybe the ideas were already there, but the music shakes them out.
Also for me, this is where it comes full circle.
Music made through software and human input inspires me to create software that when executed sounds like the program execution pipeline. I’d like to think I can hear a current program stack as a musical note signature, when a method starts and ends a note plays. I’d like to think I can imagine what it would be like to hear an exception, how it is being handled, and the data that is transmitted across an Ethernet driver. Maybe all modulated by some modern encoding like 4-PSK or something more ‘musical’ like notes translated into a MIDI controller to play binary PCM waveforms.
Yeah, I’m a nerd. ;)
I came pretty close to this as a network engineer for a datacenter once. I hand compiled a linux 2.4 kernel to include a realtime packet capture patch, and connected that in to a mirrored up link port for a router that was plugged into an OC-1. With that I used a tool to capture packets, look for an MPEG header, reassembled it on the fly, and decoded it with ffmpeg. I could hear the network.
We also used this server as a troubleshooting point to ensure the networking layer was doing what it was supposed to be doing. Neat huh?
