Bio

Abby has her B.A. in physics and M.A. in math from Boston University. She has been involved in the NKS Summer School for three years as program coordinator, two years as a participant, and one year each as teaching assistant and lecturer. She participated in the 2008 NKS Midwest Conference and recently had a paper on her 2008 NKS Summer School project published in the Journal of Complex Systems.

She writes the NKS Blog and tweets WolframNKS. She manages several Facebook NKS Summer School Alumni groups and the application page for WolframTones.

She has had over 25 Demonstrations published, many NKS-themed.

In her spare time, Abby writes fiction and poetry and studies classical voice. She enjoys cooking, painting, drawing, reading (mostly nonfiction), and working on her tiny bungalow in the pines. Once in a while, she tinkers with an original language, her message board, and her website.

Project: Song Generation Using NKS Methods

This project will further develop ideas used by WolframTones from the New Kind of Music Explorer; specifically, song structures for music generated from cellular automata. Song line transposition will be built in as a way for the user to manually alter the final song. This project will be built with a user interface—a song creator—in mind.

The song pattern—an array that determines the structure of the song, which is broken into a certain number of measures which either repeat an existing variation, are silent, or introduce new variations—can be generated many different ways, but I will be using mainly CAs or Markov machines (at least to start).

A minimal horizontal line filter will be applied to the sections of the song before they are seamed together, then other song filters will be applied. An interface will be built that will allow some user to generate a song of length at least one measure up to some number of minutes. The user can choose rule number, scale, number of instruments, tempo, total length. The user can manually transpose the song, beat by beat, after the song has been initially generated.

Favorite Four-Color Totalistic Cellular Automaton

Rule 932905