Wolfram Tones

What is the Wolfram Tones Application

I’m a big music fan. I’ve managed to max out my mp3 player and about 75% of my hard drive is music. I also relish every chance I get to make my own music and was very eager to play around with what the Wolfram Tones application had to offer.

I installed the application but had an initial problem playing some of the music. Luckily there was an easy to follow guide to set up Quicktime (which is a requirement to use Wolfram) to play MIDI files.

I don’t quite understand the science behind how the compositions work, but everything is based off on “scientific paradigm of Stephen Wolfram’s New Kind of Science, Wolfram Tones instantly generates unique, organic musical compositions based on algorithms called cellular automata. ”

It’s not hard to mess around and make your own music. I didn’t understand the rule or seed variations (instructions are provided), but basically they are template. I moved onto the instrumentation tab where I could select what instruments to include, and then onto pitch and timing.

After you have created a suitable song, you can save it to your online jukebox to share with others, or you can download it as a MIDI file onto your desktop that can be converted into an mp3 or WAV file that can be played on MP3 players.

Pros

• lots of variation
• ability to save your work
• lots of fun

Cons

• got a horrible screeching sound when ever I’d change instruments. It seemed like every time the project I was working on was reset it made this sound like a record being scratched.