 I am excited to introduce our next talk, the Red String, coming you all the way from the Algarave tent, which I understand is something that must be seen. Dragitza Kalina. Thank you. Okay, I'm talking about the Red String. Let me get my tools. So, what am I going to talk about? There is two kinds of people. The one who dig deep, the experts, they go to the end of earth or whatever. And then there are the people who do many things. They connect the people who go deep. They sometimes go deep too. But their life is like many strings. They do many things and they do it sometimes in parallel. I called my talk the Red String because strings seem to be a theme in my life. It started when I was six and I wanted to learn crochet. At six I was really bad at crochet. Now I'm better. It's at least 40 years I'm doing that now. When my first day of my master's study at the university began, the first thing I heard my physics professor tell us, we are not at biology here. You can't knit in the lectures. Naturally two years later I started with knitting in my lectures. Because knitting and crochet, he said, are too easy. Physics is really hard. So crochet is simple. Can you read that? That's lace, by the way. You can do many things with crochet and it can be very complicated. And it's interconnected. And I never stopped it. And I was really, really glad when I found out that Daima, instead of using paper to do math and to do math models, Daima, Taimina used crochet to do math. This is a hyper complex structure. And she wrote a paper about that. And since then crocheting has actually a place in mathematics. And biology. This is a reef made by many people, corals made wholly out of crochet. This is hyper geometric tiling. You can't do that with anything else. These are granny squares for everybody who does crochet on a regular basis. This is actually a Lawrence manifold. It's not the extractor. It's something that happens to in between, it's a cut between two attractors. So you can only actually crochet that. And this one is just because it's pretty. So I studied. I finished my master's degree and I wanted to start my PhD. And I wanted to actually start my PhD in string theory. It was hard for me to find a PhD in string theory. I was in Europe, mainland Europe. And there are many universities who are doing that. Actually the picture is wrong. So this is art, this is not science. Because the picture is wrong, because strings are actually... They are one dimensional. So strings. String theory is the theory of physics that tries to combine quantum mechanics or quantum field theory and gravity. They don't like each other. They are so completely different that it's really, really hard to do that. And I actually started to study physics because I wanted to do string theory because I always was fascinated by strings. So the thing is, instead of using or instead of calculating particles without any dimension, you use things with one dimension. And you find out that there is a theory that makes that possible. It's in 26 dimensional space. So you have 26 dimensional space, you roll up 22 of these dimensions and you get our 5 dimensional space and you have strings. But it doesn't work. You need them to actually be closed loops. That's what the picture shows. So you have 11 dimensional strings and you have 5 string theories. That's what I learned. Nowadays, it's slightly different. It's 20 years ago. Then M theory came and the one conference I went with string theory I found out that everybody was talking about M theory and I was doing normal string theory and that this didn't work. So I stopped my PhD and I did something else. I don't think I will do 20 minutes. Because I think there is science. Science is cool. Science is not about what I want nature to be. And string theory in many ways looks for me like what I want nature to be. There is not a lot of data you can have. Without data, it's not verifiable. You can actually have a cool idea and just find a mathematical formulation. Tell everybody that this cool idea you have is that and can write a paper. If you are at the right university, it even gets wet. My backstory was actually inspired by reading too much Pratchett. Sometimes, if you have read Pratchett, you probably all have. You know that he has these strange theories how the universe may come into existence. And my theory, and this is not science, this is art because it's storytelling. My strange idea was sometimes when I did string theory that there is this old lady sitting in a rocking chair knitting the universe. Knitting strings which vibrate at special frequencies and are our electrons, neutrons, protons and whatever there is else. So this is a depiction of the old lady knitting our universe. I stopped my PhD as I said. It was for me a little bit too much hand weaving. It was not really what I wanted to do with my life. So I looked at other things. I call this intermission. I started doing games. I programmed games and during my first triple A title when we were in the crunch time I made a t-shirt and I proudly after we actually finished it I proudly hanged it in my office and everybody was coming and looking at my t-shirt that everybody thought was crazy that I was knitting while programming but I could concentrate much better programming and debugging when my hands were actually doing something. So this was always something that happened for me. And then I started with something new. I started with music. I started with electronic music. And I started actually with electronic music because I found out that this stuff has a lot of math and it has a lot of physics. Carpalos Strong are two guys, Mr. Carpalos and Mr. Strong who had this theory how to simulate a violin. Not by samples but to simulate a violin. And it's pretty easy. You put white noise or something noisy in there and you delay it and then it sounds a little bit like a violin or a guitar. I can demonstrate. This is now the part that probably gets sound. Because this here is a sound collider. This is a sound collider and at the moment it's slightly too small for me to read. The important part is here. By the way, this is not by me. That is made by xtaudio.net. You can find all the super collider tutorials there if you want to come. If you want to come there is tomorrow, there is also workshops at the Algorithm tent. I don't say this because of the ad but because here you see what it's doing. Okay, what is it doing? You have a delay time. And the delay time is actually connected to the pitch. If you change the delay time, you change the pitch. What you do is actually you take here its white noise, delay it, make a feedback loop and the delay time actually gives you the pitch. What it does here is, the first thing it does is it calculates the delay time. It calculates the delay time out of the midi pitch you give it. So how does it sound? This is the live coding stuff. You actually have to think. Okay, it doesn't come out where it should come out. It comes out of my laptop. We will not change that but this is how it sounds. This is more the plug thing. It sounds slightly strange and artificial and that one is the one that's more the bowing one. But for something that simple, you take white noise, you put it into a delay filter, you filter it slightly, it actually sounds pretty good. I have an electronic instrument too which has this a little bit more sophisticated algorithm and uses it for a cello and it sounds really, really good. Most people can't tell if it's a cello or if it's a cello sample except cellists. They normally get it pretty fast. So I started with music because of somethings like this corpus... corpus-strong algorithm because this is actually a physical simulation what happens and there is lots of math in between there and with something like supercollider or live coding you actually can use the math for this stuff and I was really happy that I could use all my stuff that I learned at university finally to do something like music. So science to make art. Now let's come to the last one, the tuning. Most people think tuning is really simple and clear. Tuning is like I have 12 tones per octave. I normally use just 8 of them but we have this chromatic scale with 12 tones. We have this probably because our ear, how it hears, is with resonances and these resonances are really, really sensible to strong and rhythmic stuff. So why do we have the tuning we have? We have the tuning we have because the top one is an octave which has the proportion of 2 to 1 So 44 is an A and 88 is an octave above and 220 is an octave below So we have this strongest of all relations and if you look at it you see when you add two sound waves these are simple sound waves if they are an octave apart you get a periodic pattern. The same happens if you use 3 to 2 which is traditionally the one we call the fifth and you get also a periodic pattern. If you use something that isn't the simple numbers but that is more complicated numbers like 37 to 20 you get this dissonance and you get a non periodic pattern. That's why we try to use all these or Pythagoras try to use all these beautiful whole numbers. The other one is if you look at instrument spectra you see violin trumpet flute oboe that's all of them. You see they have spectrum is what you get that are the frequencies if you play a note on a violin it actually doesn't play one note it plays many notes that are the overturns the harmonics and they are spaced in a special way and we tried to have a tuning that gives us a maximum of this space so that if we play two violins in a special... sorry if we play two violins at a special interval they actually will match the overturns. That is the second thing we want to do. The problem with that is it doesn't work we can't make it work it's not mathematical it doesn't work you have things like the Pythagorean comma you want to have some things like the quint circle where you want to have everything neat and mathematically right it doesn't work. What we did is we have the equal temperament where we used 12 tones nowadays and we have the old scales these are the red dots which use the right ones and there is worse thought about this stuff so what I want to say is with that stuff is there is actually other cultures that use other systems for instance I think it's very interesting that the Indian scale, the Indian octave has 22 srutis which they use 7 out of for every scale they use so they have a completely different system also I mean other cultures have different systems and with electronic music it's actually quite easy to just chuck our system and make new ones for instance our Wilson did this fantastical drawings of scales you can look at them up they are all on the net Wendy Carlos did a scale that actually doesn't close at the octave which is revolutionary in itself because we saw that two to one the octave is really the strongest one you take a string, you half it you will get a tone and octave above and she was like no I don't like that I don't want it to close at the octave and she used other ones and then this Harry Parch he used the 37 or 43 pitches per octave scale which I think is very interesting too and he built his own instruments which you see one of them above he built his own instruments because nothing could play them and this one is a marimba but most of his instruments are strings because with strings the length is actually variable and you can actually with strings play every scale you want so a violin is actually capable of playing microtonal scales guitars are a little bit more problematic because they have frets but they are fretless guitars you can look at YouTube if you want fretless guitars are guitars with special frets so you can actually use 43 tones per octave you can find information about that on the Hugo's Fokker arc side or on the Xenharmonic wiki spaces I don't like actually the thing about these tunings is they are called microtonal which I like because we see the normal chromatic 12 tones is one tone in between so the whites and the blacks on the piano every one of them we see as one so C to C sharp C sharp to D D to D sharp and so on this is one and microtonal means we have tones in between the other one is Xenharmonic because it's mostly used in non-western cultures which I think is slightly, you know, like it's ours is not the default just because we use it so if it's okay do we have still a little bit of time I have some scales on my iPad and I would like to play some stuff for you I hope this one works always with electronic music it never works that's an Indian scale they are normally into ragas but I don't know which one is which so I just took one I liked and you hear that sometimes actually I played tones sometimes we actually don't hear the difference that's the problem if you play with scales like this now I use the Indian instrument for that that is because it sounds better now let's hear it with cello which I will use for the other ones because it's... the Indian one and now I want to play one of the Wendy Carlos scales this is Carlos Alpha that one has 15 tones per octave and now the last one it's parge 43 which is very difficult to play because 43 pitches per octave you don't have from tone to tone you probably don't have enough difference that was parge and sometimes you hear that actually the intervals sounds very nice because actually with the 43 parge made it so that the fifth is actually nearer to the pure fifth than it is in the equal temperament scale so if you use more tones you sometimes get nicer intervals so that was my talk yeah I hope I showed you new things yeah and string