1 - Doug Poole: Personal Statement

Until recently, math and music have inhabited entirely separate planes of my  consciousness; math is logical, intuitive, and absolute, while music - at least some of the strange music to which I am particularly partial - is chaotic, impulsive, and open-ended.  While I consider myself a musician, I don't really know anything about music in a theoretical sense, just tid-bits of information that I've picked up over the years.  People are always talking about how music is an inherently mathematical art, but as somebody who doesn't really know about music theory, I've never fully understood this dialectic.  I think what they are usually referring to is the mathematical underpinnings of tonal relationships, cadences, and all kinds of other cool shit that's way over my head, and probably always will be.  Last semester, however, I had the opportunity to create algorithmic music, and math unexpectedly began to influence my musical understanding.  I learned that by fiddling around with numbers and equations in a neat little computer program called "MaxMSP", I could teach the computer to create its own music.  I was the author of the algorithms, but the algorithms themselves created music that was completely unexpected, and that was generated beyond the faculty of my own creative foresight.  I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this.  I guess I'm just fascinated by the way in which one can use math to generate art in unexpected ways.  While I was introduced to this concept through music, I think that it might be cool to experiment with mathematical algorithms in the field of visual art, where they can exist beyond the confines of a computer program - the possibilities just seem endless.  There's all sorts of other stuff that I'd like to talk about, but i guess I'll just leave it at that for now.

Also:

Here's a cool link to a video of a fella who seems to fit the definition of a "hybrid artist."

Christian Marclay