Jonathan Coulton‘s music is about as close as one can get to the perfect accompaniment to the OpenScience project. He’s got songs like Code Monkey about the lives and times of coders, and he’s got the best song about fractals ever written: Mandelbrot Set which actually contains the formula for a fractal (including recursion!) in the lyrics. My favorite song, however, is the new internet phenomenon about an interoffice memo from your Zombie coworkers: Re Your Brains.
I’m finding his songs incredibly smart with lots of little lyrical and musical easter eggs. If that wasn’t enough, Jonathan’s songs are released with Creative Commons licenses and without DRM of any sort. In short, he’s the closest we’ve got to an open source muse.
Go give his a listen and buy his songs!
(I’m sure Jonathan’s heard this from a billion people by now, but his formula in the Mandelbrot Set song is actually the formula for the Julia Set. The Mandelbrot set includes something slightly different; the Mandelbrot set includes those points as c is scanned over the complex plane for which the Julia set iterated by z = z2 + c is connected.)
Forget I said that. I’m just amazed someone can make a good song that includes recursive algorithms in the chorus…
[tags]music, mathematics, code, science, creative commons[/tags]
