Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter describes and defines the concept of recursion, and discusses its applications in computer science, consciousness, art, music, biology and various other fields. Recursion is crucial to writing computer programs in a compact, elegant way, but it also opens the door to infinite loops and irreconcilable logical contradictions.
Filed in Math, Music, Writing
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Also tagged anthills, bach, books, buddhism, computer science, douglas hofstadter, emergence, escher, godel, looping, meditation, recursion, Sampling, xkcd
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I always enjoy when hip-hop artists sample themselves. It makes the music recursive, and for me, “recursive” is synonymous with “good.” You can hear self-sampling in “Nas Is Like” by Nas, “The Score” by the Fugees and many songs by Eric B and Rakim. The most recent self-sampling track to cross my radar is “Unbelievable” [...]
Filed in Key Musicians, Math, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged digging the crates, dj premier, funk, hip-hop, impeach the president, keybs, lee byron, mandelbrot, nas, notorious big, nursery rhymes, patrice rushen, r kelly, recursion, rnb, Sampling, songwriting, turntablism
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The best and most thought-provoking game of the DOS era was Starflight. Kids today, with their intuitive graphical user interfaces. They have no idea what a pain it was to use computers back in the eighties. DOS especially was an autistic nightmare. Bill Gates is some kind of genius to have convinced so many people [...]
Writing a song is a lot like writing a computer program. They both require clever management of loops and control flow. The simplest sheet music reads as a straightforward top-to-bottom list of instructions. You start on measure one and read through to the end sequentially. That’s fine unless the music is very repetitive, which most [...]
Filed in Composition, Math, Music, Software
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Also tagged chameleon, computer science, computers, electronica, herbie hancock, Improvisation, james brown, looping, mandelbrot, Math, Music, music notation, programming, recursion, visualization
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