Week 2 - Math + Art/Robotics + Art

For me—a music lover and an audio engineer—the influence of math on art is immediately apparent as soon as sound hits my ears. Even when you split the creative and technical side of music, math continues to worm its way into the core of what we hear.

When it comes to the creative end, we can take a look at what is called progressive music. This kind of sound is a purely creative application of math into the songs. A so-called progressive sound includes oddball time signatures (the way that the beat of the song is counted), atypical song structures and frequent changes in key, a system that defines “proper” notes by the specific mathematical intervals. Author Paul Hegarty considered virtuosic application of math into the music a critical component of progressive rock.

The circle of fifths. This chart is a visual aid for the mathematical intervals that define the notes in a key.

As for the technical side- well, that’s why I chose electrical engineering for my major in the first place! For one, how about the fact that any piece of audio can be modeled as a summation of nearly infinite sinusoidal signals? Math begets physics, and physics explains what we hear. Let’s take an average MP3 bought from iTunes, encoded at a sampling rate of 44,100 Hz. Why such a random number? Well, the math behind the Nyquist-Shannon Theorem tells us if we want a certain frequency to come through, we must sample at a rate twice that frequency. Humans can hear from 20-20,000 Hz, so we need to sample at a rate of at least 40,000 Hz. The extra wiggle room of 4,100 Hz allows us to design effective filters that prevent aural nastiness. See, all that math allows us to hear the most annoying high-pitched frequencies you can imagine!

Without Nyquist-Shannon, the analog to digital to analog encoding and decoding process wouldn't work. Artifacts on artifacts on artifacts!

Within the robot and art combos presented in the lecture materials, I immediately connected with the Arduino project. What I enjoy about it is that it effectively provides an artist’s canvas to everyday engineers. What Arduino provides isn’t so much art itself so much as potential for art, which is something I find very cool. Engineers aren’t known for being the most creatively minded individuals out there, so I almost see Arduino as a challenge of sorts to the engineers- “Here are the tools, now go ahead and prove everyone wrong.” That’s pretty rad I think. I mentioned this artist in a comment last week, but I think his work fits almost perfectly here. I’m referring to H.R. Giger, the inventor of the “biomech” art that was made famous in the Alien film series. Giger’s work is a direct representation of robotics in art, often showing humanoid creatures enhanced by machines or even creatures where their origins as organic or cybernetic would be ambiguous.

Japan's Mobile Suit Gundam anime series is also another blatant example of robotics translated to visual arts. Woohoo for childhood nostalgia!

Sources

C. E. Shannon, "Communication in the presence of noise", Proc. Institute of Radio Engineers, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 10–21, Jan. 1949.

Hegarty, Paul, and Martin Halliwell. Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock since the 1960s. New York: Continuum, 2011. Print.

Williamson, Marcus. "HR Giger: Artist Hailed for His Surrealistic Creatures in Nightmare Landscapes Who Won an Oscar for His Work on 'Alien'"The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 14 Mar. 2014. Web. 06 July 2014.

"Arduino - Introduction." Arduino. Arduino, n.d. Web. 06 July 2014.