It is as if the guy who runs the record store was reading my blog when he sent out his newsletter today.  The New Arrivals list included Iannis Xenakis’ Pithoprakta.  This piece, described in more detail here.

The key part of the write up:

Xenakis tried to emulate the behaviour of an ideal gas through the musical equivalent of the kinetic gas theory, assigning to each molecular speed of a gas a pizzicato glissando event, with the slope of the glissando proportional to the corresponding particle’s speed. Arguing that, according to the law of large numbers, the differences in speed (each glissando) as the number of particles (in this case each instrument of the orchestra) increases tend to disappear in average and the macroscopic effect is one of a constant, ie. the gas temperature, which is proportional to the average speed of all the particles that are part of it

This is, to some degree the basis of my most recent composition.  The key difference (and it is a substantial one) is that my piece is concerned with a computer simulation of a fluid, and Xenakis was mapping sound to a mathematical description of a fluid.  I like that he is capturing the randomness of fluid dynamics in a musical composition, though he certainly isn’t the first — John Cage is another who used lots of randomness, and mappings from natural processes to music during his career. 

Now, I don’t know much about Xenakis, and I hadn’t heard of this piece until today.  I did some reading, and it turns out that he was an engineer, by degree, who felt his talents were better applied to the criticism and production of music.  That means he was a nerd too!