CIS/COM S/ENGRI/MUSIC/PYSCH/FILM/DANCE 165
  Computing in the Arts
   Fall 2007

Instructor:  Professor Graeme Bailey

  • Tentative syllabus: Fall 2007

  • Class discussions so far ...
    1. basic probabilty and stochastic composition in poetry ... experiments, and tuning the probabilities for effect.
    2. Presentations of student Markov poems, and discussion of ways of embodying 'poetic content'. Exercise in analysing a pre-existing poem to acquire a Markov structure, and then using that to create a viable 'fake'.
    3. Presentations of 'faked' poems. Intro to music notation, intervals, and harmonics. Initial discussion of harmony and cognitive aspects, and ways of manipulating expectations.
    4. Gentle discussion of harmonics for ideal strings, inharmonicity, and related cognitive aspects. Use of chords (triads) on the notes of a scale to create sets from which to harmonise a given tune. Reversal of this process to construct a tune by first building (stochastically?) an underlying harmonic flow, exploiting relative distances between chords based on numbers of notes in common.
    5. Introduction to Java programming. Integers and Strings, Math.random(), writing a simple program KickOff.java using an 'if/else' conditional, and playing with arrays.
    6. An intro to using 'for loops' Kicky2.java, and drawing lines and 'blobs' in a drawing pane Drawing.java.
    7. Using Java to create midi tunes PlayerPiano.java
    8. First thoughts on groups, illustrations with symmetries of planar objects and gentle discussion on use in animation
    9. More careful discussion of groups, with examples: integers mod 12, rotations+reflections in the plane about the origin (non-Abelian), permutations as operations on a set of objects.
    10. Detailed discussion of groups as groups of 'actions' acting on things in a set, leading to thinking of subgroups of actions. Also introduced the ideas of an 'orbit' (the set of things visited when a group element's action is repeated on a particular thing in the set), and an equivalence relation partitioning the set of things into disjoint orbits.
    11. First steps in putting these ideas about groups into a coherent structure by introducing quotient groups, G/H.
      • examples: rotations about all points in the plane, reflections about all straight lines, and all translations; viewing these actions as combinations of rotations about the origin, reflection through the x-axis, and all translations,
      • integers mod 12 (finiite example with lots of nested orbits),
      • playing with the subgroups of the group of permutations of 4 objects.
    12. Introduction to the compositional model of Lou Harrison via 'melodicals', 'rhythmicals', and 'interval constraints'. Brief discussion of the perception of symmetry -- slides available here.

    • News etc

    Humming experiment homework

    Optional Sections

    Articles and Examples