Musical Analogues of Mathematical Concepts by professor Ville Pulkki

Welcome to attend the opening on December 13th at 16:00.

Our aesthetic experience in performing arts, like music, drama or dance, is associated with dynamic sound and movement, while the field of mathematics speaks the language of rigid formulas. Ville Pulkki’s artistic work comes from his curiosity towards finding ways of expressing mathematical concepts through music. Pulkki, who works in the field of engineering, discovered many years ago that that when he mapped the bits of a binary sequence to his fingers and played it on the piano, the outcome was a pleasant music. In his experimental sound pieces, Pulkki focuses on conveying the logic and meaning of mathematical phenomena in a clear and understandable way, translating them with the help of graphics and melody. 

Ville Pulkki acts as Associate Professor in Acoustics in the Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics, School of Electrical Engineering. He leads the communication acoustics research group, working on methods to capture and reproduce sound in space, that would allow guiding the human perception, i.e. spatial audio. Pulkki has received prestigious medal awards of his lifetime achievements from Society of Motion Picture and Television engineers, and from the Audio Engineering Society. Pulkki got his Doctoral degree and Docentship in the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK), and also studied for the degree of Master of Music in Sibelius Academy. 

Ville Pulkki is a member of Strategic Joint Initiative of Art and Creative Practices in Aalto University. This exhibition shows his computer music compositions from 1991–2018.