Wrath of the Math
Inspired by Jeru the Damaja's upcoming show, I made something interesting yesterday. Was thinking about waves and how they're made by different devices. Square waves are my favourite and I was trying to picture what happens to one as a filter is applied to it. So I used a Fourier series to square out the corners of a sine wave. Goes like this:
So add up every odd harmonic of a sine wave with frequency n and amplitude 1/n. A filter excludes certain frequencies, so if you have a low-pass, for instance, you make the corners fuzzy. This makes it sound softer. This animation from Wikipedia should help:
I did this via brute force in Excel. At the side is a conditionally formatted spreadsheet with the first Pi radians (half a cycle). Note the trippy diffraction patterns.Here's a song that makes extensive use of square waves:
Boards of Canada - Circle
posted by stan at 6:12 PM
5 Comments:
You yet again amaze me, square waves are cool. i guess ditching girls for math homework pays off, cool shit. I come from a logical brain, but not a math brain, i understand breaking things down makes things simpler.
But doesn't breaking this music down take the fun out of it, like trying to understand how they get caramilk into the caramilk bar? (Aside: on Van island they now have plastic inside cadbury products, lawsuit?) Somethings are better untouched, you mean to think all the britney fans would know that her voice is pitch corrected and modulated the shit out of, and lip-sync'd in concert, hell no, it would crush the economy of pre-teens. A bunch of little girls would be walking around, aimlessly, with no reason to live, and distressed as the swift reality hits them in the face, like when they get passed first base for the first time.
All kidding aside, education is good. Word.
Stan,
Fuck you. I was just about to post a blog entry about the same thing. i'll get you gadget.
p.s.- im finished the mix. it's on!
i'm going to burst your bubbles.
biology is more interesting than math stan! For instance (Paul) how they get the caramel into the caramilk bars:
A type of bacteria that i can't remember the name of secretes an enzyme called invertase. The enzyme and the hard block of caramel is places inbetween the chocolat. As a bit of time goes on the invertase breaks down the solid caramel and makes it viscous.
now all gasp!
I re-read the blog and co-incidentally "Pocket Calculator" by Kraftwerk was playing..... it so fitting, I think all you need is a pocket protector and you'd officially be a music "geek" or "Sonderling".
"by pressing down this special key, it plays a little melody"
Four eyes.
Ahaha, I know.
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