Functional Composition • Chris Ford • YOW! 2018

Music can be represented computationally through functional programming, treating musical elements as pure data structures and transformations

Canons are musical pieces built through functional composition - taking a melody and applying transformations like delays, mirrors, and intervals

Sound waves work through frequency (pitch) and amplitude (volume), with realistic instruments combining multiple harmonics rather than pure sine waves

Musical scales and keys can be modeled as functions that transform relative positions into actual frequencies/pitches

Version control and functional programming allow for cumulative development of musical pieces while maintaining pure transformations

Western music notation is optimized for human performance but can obscure underlying mathematical and computational patterns

Musical structures like swing rhythm and blues scales can be represented through mathematical transformations of timing and pitch

The psychology of sound processing means listeners reconstruct meaning from signals based on cultural context and learned patterns

Domain-specific abstractions in code can help express musical concepts more naturally while maintaining flexibility

Bach’s Canone alla Quarta demonstrates how complex musical structures emerge from combining simple transformations like mirroring, delay, and pitch shifts