Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Chaos in music

In an earlier post, I talked about fractals mentioned in the lyrics of a song. Today, I heard the song "Jurassic Park" by Al Yankovic, which mentions chaos theory, a related branch of mathematics that studies the unpredictable and complex behavior of dynamical systems, often manifested as sensitive dependence on initial conditions. On the other hand, musical compositions themselves can exhibit fractal and chaotic behavior [1,2].

References:

[1] K J Hsü and A Hsü, "Self-similarity of the "1/f noise" called music," PNAS, vol. 88, no. 8, pp. 3507-3509, 1991.
[2] J. Beran, "Music - Chaos, Fractals, and Information," CHANCE, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 7-16, 2004.