iGetIt! Music

Online music education courseware for non-musicians who want to learn how to write their own rock songs.

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Name: Jim Plamondon
Location: Austin, Texas, United States

This blog documents the development of JIMS iGetIt! Music System (JIMS). JIMS' goal is to help you Understand Music in 24 Hours™, if you are (a) a non-musician (b) who wants to learn how to write your own rock songs. Requiring no instrument other than your own computer, and without using traditional notation, JIMS is being designed to deliver a deep understanding of tonal structure...in just 24 hours.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Help! Voronoi expert wanted

If you know anything about the mathematics of Voronoi diagrams, I need your help.

The Isomorphic Conspiracy (Andy Milne, Bill Sethares, and myself, with various single-paper collaborators) has published three peer-reviewed journal papers so far, and a bunch of conference papers, on isomorphic keyboards and their unique musical capabilities. In that work, we have, so far, used an approach that tied the notions of "note-layout" and "button-arrangement" inextricably together.

For example, consider the Wicki-note-layout, mapped to a perfectly-regular hexagonal button-arrangement. If you squish the rows of the button-arrangement to be a smidgeon closer together (as the Thummer does), then the result wouldn't be the Wicki note-layout anymore, under our original definition, because the button-arrangement was no longer strictly hexagonal. It would be something else, albeit something closely related, but we had way to describe the relationship mathematically.

We're hot on the trail of a new approach that separates note-layouts from button-arrangements. The mathematics of Voronoi diagrams are central to the new approach, because they can help us define the conditions under which one button is adjacent to another, as a regular lattice of buttons is systematically deformed away from perfect regularity. We're making pretty good progress, but the work would procede much faster if we could bring someone into the Conspiracy, for this one paper at least, who knew Voronoi mathematics inside-out.

If you know a Voronoi-math expert, preferably one who also has an interest music, please let me know.

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