Wednesday, 13 February 2019

Convolution and Carl Stone

I was listening to an interview with the composer Carl Stone on Hear and Now on Radio 3. Here's the link but it's only valid for a few days more https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00022k6 The first piece is called Hatiya and he describes it as being a CONVOLUTION. Now that's a term from Mathematics that is used in Physics. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution If you scroll down to the animated box, it is particularly helpful. Essentially, you seem to slide one signal over another and integrate to find the common area. That common area is then plotted as a new function - the convolution. Carl Stone has taken a piece of Algerian music and then moved a piece of wetern classical music through it - in a way analogous to the animation in Wikipedia. The result is interesting and helpful to understanding convolution.