The Research Management Center congratulates Associate Professor Dr. Darren Ong Chung Lee from the Mathematics and Applied Mathematics Department on winning the Best Virtual Presentation Award at the ICMSA 2020 (the 16th IMT-GT International Conference of Mathematics, Statistics, and their Applications), which took place on 23-24 November 2020. 

This international conference was initiated by IMT-GT (Indonesia-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle) consortium to promote mathematics and statistics in the region. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was held online, and all presentations were given as virtual presentations over Microsoft Teams.

Dr. Ong’s presentation was entitled “Quasiperiodic Music”. The research paper was published on Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, an SCI Q1 journal published by Taylor and Francis. This open access paper is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/17513472.2020.1766339.

The video of the presentation is available below:

For this research project, Dr. Ong used the concept of “quasiperiodic function” in mathematics to compose music with interesting features. This “quasiperiodic music” can go on forever without repetition, though at certain times the music will get very close to repeating. Dr. Ong composed a simple piece of music, Raindrops in A minor to illustrate the concept. Below is a 30-second clip of Raindrops in A minor:

This work was partially supported by a grant from the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme by the Malaysian Ministry of Education (Grant No: FRGS/1/2018/STG06/XMU/02/1) and two Xiamen University Malaysia Research Funds (Grant Numbers: XMUMRF/2018-C1/IMAT/0001 and XMUMRF/2020-C5/IMAT/0011).