Reading Complexity in Chua's oscillator through Music. Part I: a New Way of Understanding Chaos

Modern Science is finding new methods of looking at biological, physical or social phenomena. Traditional methods of quantification are no longer sufficient and new approaches are emerging. These approaches make it apparent that the phenomena the observer is looking at are not classifiable by conventional methods. These phenomena are complex. A complex system, as Chua’s oscillator, is a nonlinear configuration whose dynamical behavior is chaotic. Chua’s oscillator equations allow to define the basic behavior of a dynamical system and to detect the changes in the qualitative behavior of a system when bifurcation occurs, as parameters are varied. The typical set of behavior of a dynamical system can be detailed as equilibrium points, limit cycles, strange attractors. The concepts, methods and paradigms of Dynamical Systems Theory can be applied to understand human behavior. Human behavior is emergent and behavior patterns emerge thanks to the way the parts or the processes are coordinated among themselves. In fact, the listening process in humans is complex and it develops over time as well. Sound and music can be both inside and outside humans. This tutorial concerns the translation of Chua’s oscillators into music, in order to find a new way of understanding complexity by using music. By building up many computational models which allow the translation of some quantitative features of Chua’s oscillator into sound and music, we have created many acoustical and musical compositions, which in turn present the characteristics of dynamical systems from a perceptual point of view. We have found interesting relationships between dynamical systems behavior and their musical translation since, in the process of listening, human subjects perceive many of the structures as possible to perceive in the behavior of Chua’s oscillator. In other words, human cognitive abilities can analyze the large and complicated patterns produced by Chua’s systems translated into music, achieving the cognitive economy and the coordination and synthesis of countless data at our disposal that occur in the perception of dynamic events in the real world. Music can be considered the semantics of dynamical systems, which gives us a powerful method for interpreting complexity.