Numbers in places: creative interventions in musical space & time

Abstract

Ada Lovelace noted that Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine "might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent". The Numbers into Notes project, in its first phase, explored how this might have occurred nearly two centuries ago on the giant steam-powered machine using the mathematics of the time. Now we are asking what Lovelace might do today, with a microcontroller instead of the analytical engine. In our experiment, multiple devices are programmed to generate music, with creative interventions by humans to compose and influence the experience in locative sound.