Wolfram Virtual Technology Conference

3 densely inspiring days of indulgence in two of my passions, Math and Music

This week (WTC[{“We”},{“Th”},{“Fr”}]), I was moved to action by the excellent presentations and “After Hours” sessions.

First, Stephen’s keynote address was thoughtful, relevant and positive (a welcome perspective of the current state of things). In the last part of his keynote, he really made me re-think my long-time habit of staying in the cozy comfort zone of writing almost all my own low level code (in other great languages). That was something that resonated with me and reminded me of the benefits of coding at a higher level. The Wolfram language and the Mathematica notebook environment frees you of as much of the low-level struggle as can be hoped for (and it’s still fun!)

Watch to the keynote:

TheInnovator award winners list some pretty impressive contributions.

Here’s a link to a recent post introducing this year’s Innovator Award Winners. on Danielle Mayer’s blog.

And among all the great sessions I attended that took place throughout the week, my favorite was the presentation that links the environment to music creation tools…

Introducing Symbolic Music in Wolfram Language

Speakers: Carlo Giacometti, Rebecca Frederick
Handle notes, voices, scores and more in Wolfram Language: get a glimpse into what’s coming for symbolic music in the next release!

I’m not sure if the session is available yet as a public link, but I suspect it will be available in Wolfram MathWorld or somewhere soon.

Content in this talk happens to align nicely with the Muvicado concept in several (just to name a few) ways.

I can’t wait to start using some of these:

• Import[] of MIDI files
• Wolfram APIs for MIDI interfacing
• audio rendering of MIDI sequences
• SoundNote[]
• MusicVoice[]
• MusicNote[]
• MusicScore[]
• MusicPlot[]
• MusicRest[]
• MusicTimeSignature[]
• MusicKeySignature[]
• MusicChord[]
• MusicInterval[“PerfectFifth”]
• MusicNoteDuration[]
• MusicNotePitch[]
• MusicMeasure[]
• MusicXML. MEI, MNX

The future directions of these music-related WL features are quite promising!

And Mathematica is now my most fun single tool to use.