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Musician Creates a Million-Hour Song Based On the Number Pi (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Now, for Pi Day (March 14), music software programmer Canton Becker has crafted a million-hour song based on Pi that unfolds generatively on a virtual tape deck. Titled "Shepard's Pi," the song combines two of Becker's favorite infinities: Pi, and an auditory illusion called a Shepard tone, which he describes as an "unsettling sonic illusion of a pitch that climbs or descends forever, never reaching a top or a bottom." Found at PiSongs.com, users can tune into "Shepard's Pi" in real time with a custom virtual tape deck. The track itself evolves moment to moment, but the synthesized and sampled tones will be familiar to anyone who has ever listened to the electronic music of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Aphex Twin, and Global Communication. Far from being a mere gimmick, it is a highly evocative and transporting piece of electronic music, alternately ambient, glitchy, and interestingly rhythmic. The 58,999 GB MP3 file needed to be distributed via a webpage or app, so Becker "started hacking away at the basic algorithm in the programming languages PHP and Javascript," reports Motherboard. "In between coding marathons, Becker composed and recorded the loops and samples that would form the basis of the song. He experimented with sounds that would work well together regardless of being stacked one upon the other."
"When users hit 'play' on the virtual tape deck, the algorithm actually 'performs' the piece," the report says. "This way, the 114-year song can fit in just one gigabyte of space, which is mostly comprised of the digits of Pi. The virtual tape deck was also a solution to a built-in quirk of browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox -- users must click on a webpage to trigger a sound." From start to finish, the song lasts 999,999 hours, "a limitation imposed by only considering the first one billion digits of Pi."
"When users hit 'play' on the virtual tape deck, the algorithm actually 'performs' the piece," the report says. "This way, the 114-year song can fit in just one gigabyte of space, which is mostly comprised of the digits of Pi. The virtual tape deck was also a solution to a built-in quirk of browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox -- users must click on a webpage to trigger a sound." From start to finish, the song lasts 999,999 hours, "a limitation imposed by only considering the first one billion digits of Pi."
Sounds pleasant enough though
So, roughly half the songs performed by Tool then?
Auto-generated song sounds as expected. Ambience at best. Stupid. Pointless.
I'm guessing his significant other at some point said, "If you don't give up that silly music hobby, you'll never hear the end of it," and he decided to prove the point.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
So, if you combined this with the 31.4 trillion digits of Pi computed recently (setting a new record), you'd end up with 31,399,968,600 hours of music. That's 1,308,332,025 days, if you divide that by 365.24 days in a year, you get 3,582,116 years of music.
That's compared to the 41,667 days (114 years) that you'll get with the current web applet....
"NOTE: Audio is a little glitchy on Firefox. Please consider using Chrome"
I can't tell you how much I hate people who actively promote that malware cancer.
As fascinating as a rotting banana watching itself rot. At the Hyde Park, of course. It would be more fascinating if he just made music, and not the $popcharts type. I would be eager to listen to that.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Where's the undergound pi?
In all serious, it gets interesting in a creepy way at 3 hrs, 14 minutes, 15 seconds mark. Not sure if I care for the "speaking". :-/
Still waiting to fast forward to the 314159:26:53 mark ... =P
Mmmm Pi
Pi tastes goood
Even 1GB seems insane. Pi and the tones/samples can be generated algorithmically. I bet I could code this whole thing in a 64K demo. In fact I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already done exactly that.
So he's essentially created a music generator that turns semi random numbers into semi listenable music.
What is it about pi that makes some people think it is fascinating?
Purely serendipitous, but recently I was actually doing some thinking about pi. Actually I was just using pi because the digits were conveniently available. My first line of analysis led to https://oeis.org/A036903, which begins 32, 606, 8555, 99849, 1369564, 14118312, 166100506, 1816743912, 22445207406, 241641121048, 2512258603207... It's hard to follow their explanation, but the 32 is where the first 0 appears, which is the last 1-digit sequence (base 10), 606 is where the last 2-digit sequence appears for the first time, and so on.
What I was actually looking for was a characterization of the randomness of an irrational number, pi in this case. There is a formula that predicts the values of A036903. It is (10^n)*(ln(10^n)) for (n-1)-digit sequences. There was also a diversion into binary representations and the corresponding sequences and formula (though the binary version of A036903 is apparently not in the OEIS).
I don't think this is meaningful, but I did find it curious that for the case of pi 7 of the first 8 decimal predictions were low, while 5 of the 10 binary predictions were low and 5 were high. At least I can't imagine what meaning those results might have.
After some thought, I would now reword my original question as "What are the characteristics of irrational numbers that come closest to (or farthest from) the predicted values?
I would also make one randomness prediction: The last number that completes each series (for any irrational number) should be random. In other words, it was completely random that 0 was the last digit to appear for the 1-digit sequences, and the same degree of randomness should apply for the last 2-digit value, etc.
(However that did give me a really weird idea... It would be possible for almost all of the four-digit (decimal) sequences to appear before the final 3-digit sequence appeared. It would then require at least 37 more digits to finish the 4-digit sequences. (Actually slightly less than 37 digits is possible if the overlaps were arranged carefully.) I think anything approaching such extremely short gaps would be extremely weird--but still random and should be discovered if enough irrational numbers are studied hard enough.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Can't get it to load, but the comments it makes while it is loading are pretty funny.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I mean, is it a "song"?
Using the sequential digits of pi as seeds for triggering what is more or less a cascade of music isn't, in my view, a "song" any more than a wind-chime randomly dinging some noise all in the right key because those are the only notes available.
That's what this is, really: electronica wind chimes.
I like electronica (for example, I often listen to http://youarelistening.to/minn...) but while pleasant, soothing, and all those things - still not really a SONG.
-Styopa
I listened to about 20 seconds of it and it became redundant.
This is pretty neat and all, but the people talking over the music makes it totally uninteresting. I can't find a way to turn them off.
I kept waiting for the drop !
Oh, digg, I heard of that, isn't that supposed to be the new slashdot?
I'd rather listen to Daniwell's version of Miku Hatsune singing 10,000 digits of Pi:
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch...
I moused all over the screen looking for a hidden tool tip for volume but couldn't find it. I guess I'm just not up to speed on the modern UX. Can anyone give me a clue?
There was a Mac program called 99 Bottles that you could start at up to 9,999,999,999,999,999 bottles.
I've just started listening. As a fan of Tangerine Dream, I have to say, this is pretty good stuff. I think it will be great as background music for things like programming.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
For nerds to masturbate to. It'a high time for society to take a stand and round up all the incel neckbeards. They cannot function within society, so they must go.
So can we start to sue composers of any new records because they're using parts of this song ?
It sounds like trance music written by monkeys. Actually, monkeys might do better than an irrational number.
Why not just keep computing digits of pi as the song plays rather than stopping at a billion digits?