For personal and emotional reasons, I cannot seem to bring myself to use the results of mathematical operations in my music, i.e., "generate" musical material from mathematical operations. For some reason, I have a block against the very word "generate". Instead, I try to set up situations that resemble improvisation, where I am confronted with musical possibilities whose structural provenance I cannot determine or cannot remember. Then I observe myself making decisions about how to shape that material, and I try to do so in an unsystematic, purely "intuitive" way, convinced that my intuition has its own structure and not caring to peek under the hood any further than that (i.e., figuring out the very mechanics of my own intuition -- great way to drive oneself crazy, that would be!*)
That's funny in some ways. When I'm trying to be a bit orderly about writing a piece of music, I'll often try to come up with as many different ideas as I can, lay them out in front of me, and see what I think sounds right &c.. All very basic at my level of composition, but for one instance: I have also written basic programs to look for contrapuntal relations between melodies; so if I happen to be working on a piece of music that has melodies X Y and Z, I usually put them in to it to see if there are any other combinations it can come up with that I didn't (invariably there are), and I listen to them, and maybe consider using them if they sound good. I amn't an active fan of arithmetic or algorithmic music (though it can be interesting, there's a lot of stuff out there that ... I find it hard to get my head about the dodgy theoretical justifications and listen to the music as music, because they write it not as music, but as "music that sounds like the digits pi", for one silly example), but as a tool of exploration of options one might be interested in (I guess all electronic instruments are, to varying extents, illustrations of this, though maybe from a more engineering and physics more than specifically *mathematical* angle).
Thought, to be honest, I use such tools uncommonly, regard them as being in some sense pre-creative, and ... something else ... bugger; I've gone and forgotten my third point!
Though I am strong in mathematics, it took me a long time to realize that my understanding of that subject was actually getting in the way of my enjoyment of the composition process, even getting in the way of hearing (?). Math is a will-o-wisp, an attractive light that continually tempts me into the swamp of unreal order; I have to largely ignore it if I intend to make (finish!) something I can be happy with. After all, reality is messy, or the clash of conflicting realities is more 'real' than any order one imposes on it.
Maths can be messy as well! I don't fully understand where you're coming from; for me, mathematical methods can be good for consciously thinking about order where there is order. Of course, if you think such considerations to be of an unmusical nature (or detrimental to your musicality) for you, this takes precedence!
I'm not sure this helps the maths and music discussion
Well, I think it might!
