Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!munnari!vuwcomp!andrew
From: andrew@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Andrew Vignaux)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Musical output from numerical simulations
Keywords: musical output, numerical simulations, Douglas Adams
Message-ID: <14341@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Date: 31 Oct 88 03:09:58 GMT
References: <12689@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Reply-To: andrew@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Andrew Vignaux)
Organization: Comp Sci, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.
Lines: 48

This is a completely unhelpful reply -- but it confirms that nature sometimes
mimics fiction.

In article <12689@duke.cs.duke.edu> hsg@romeo.cs.duke.edu (Henry Greenside) writes:
>For a demo as part of a nonlinear dynamics course, I would like to write a
>LSC application that would integrate ordinary differential equations that
>have chaotic behavior (e.g., the 3-variable Lorenz equations) and present
>the output (value of x(t), y(t), z(t)) as musical tones. The integration of
>o.d.e.s is easy, the translation into sound is not.

There is a character in Douglas Adams' book "Dirk Gently's Holistic
Detective Agency" whose current project is to write an all-singing,
all-dancing Macintosh spreadsheet program

"... And being of a slightly whimsical turn of mind I took him literally."

"... So I sat down and wrote a program that'll take those numbers and do
 what you like with them.  If you want a bar graph it'll do them as a bar
 graph, if you want a pie chart or scatter graph it'll do them as a pie
 chart or scatter graph.  If you want dancing girls jumping out of the pie
 chart in order to distract attention from the figures the pie chart
 actually represents, then the program will do that as well.  Or you can
 turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the
 formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will
 be determined by the performance of each division of your company.  Great
 for producing animated corporate logos that actually *mean* something."

"But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted you company
 accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well.  Well,
 I thought it was silly.  The corporate world went bananas over it."

"... Not so much here.  The yearly accounts of most British companies
 emerged sounding like the Dead March from Saul, but in Japan they went for
 it like a pack of rats.  It produced lots of cheery company anthems that
 started well, but if you were going to criticise you'd probably say that
 they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end."

This has nothing to do with the rest of the book (which is described on the
cover as a Ghost-Horror-Detective-Whodunit-Time-Travel-Romantic-Musical-Comedy
Epic), but I am waiting for such a product to actually be released [perhaps
on the NeXT box ?] :-)

[Quotations from "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams
(re: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), Heinemann. ISBN 0-434-00900-8]

Andrew
--
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