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Musician Creates a Million-Hour Song Based On the Number Pi (vice.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the because-Pi dept.

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."

43 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Million hour song by nwaack · · Score: 3, Funny

    So, roughly half the songs performed by Tool then?

    1. Re:Million hour song by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      Ouch! Cue the inevitable flame war between Tool and Muse fans. =P

    2. Re:Million hour song by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2, Funny

      So, roughly half the songs performed by Tool then?

      Tool songs aren't actually a million hours long. They just seem that way.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    3. Re:Million hour song by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1

      Ouch! Cue the inevitable flame war between Tool and Muse fans. =P

      Don't you talk shit about Muse. I watched Bohemian Rhapsody not long ago, and while it was kind of a mediocre music biopic, it also reminded me that hysterical, operatic British hard rock is in desperately short supply these days. Say what you will about Muse, but at least they're stepping up to the plate to take a swing. Yes, their music is derivative, and yes their lyrics are sophomoric, but they're at least trying for the mantle left empty by Queen.

      Plus, their music is terrific for playing video games.

      Tool, on the other hand, is kind of meh. I hope that brings some clarity to this discussion.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    4. Re:Million hour song by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 1

      The biggest heartbreak about Bohemian Rhapsody was its inaccuracies. Freddie was not "always gay." His band members cited on several occasions that it was "all girls" in the beginning. And the implication that all gays come out at some truck stop is just too much. The movie had little to do with the amazing music of Queen, and that is a real Bohemian Rhapsody tragedy.

      That and that there were other people in Queen besides Freddie Mercury. Brian May is a hell of a great guitarist. It would have been nice for them to have added 2 to 5 minutes about him building the Red Special.

      According to the movie the only thing Roger Taylor contributed to the band was a song about loving his car and being the soprano part in "Bohemian Rhapsody". John Deacon's only contribution was the bass line for "Another One Bites the Dust".

    5. Re:Million hour song by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Plus, their music is terrific for playing video games.
      Tool, on the other hand, is kind of meh. I hope that brings some clarity to this discussion.

      Tool, specifically Aenima, was great music for ye olde Quake. Music to gib by.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re:Million hour song by Mordaximus · · Score: 1

      Tool, specifically Aenima, was great music for ye olde Quake. Music to gib by.

      One of my top two Quake albums. The other was the soundtrack to Spawn.

  2. Stupid bullshit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Auto-generated song sounds as expected. Ambience at best. Stupid. Pointless.

    1. Re: Stupid bullshit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Is this idiot millennial even a musician? No, he is an idiot millennial who set up a sound generator and called himself a musician.

  3. There's a joke here somewhere. by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:There's a joke here somewhere. by rmdingler · · Score: 1

      Can of corn, piece of cake, easy as PIE.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

  4. If you the currently available digits of Pi... by Falcor · · Score: 1

    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....

    1. Re:If you the currently available digits of Pi... by Cederic · · Score: 1

      Surely the answer is to keep calculating additional digits of pi while playing the generated music thus far. 114 years should be enough time to hit that 31.4 trillion, and the next three million years probably offers enough time to calculate enough digits to keep going until the heat death of the universe.

      Bloody musicians, never think things through.

    2. Re:If you the currently available digits of Pi... by rmdingler · · Score: 1

      Indeed. I think we can stipulate it's a long fracking time.

      Let's do a plane metaphor for clarity:

      It's like the amount of time it takes for your mother-in-law to get tired of talking about the boy your wife should've married, on a flight from New York to Singapore, while you endure a category 6 hangover during a category 5 hurricane, with a paper cut on your left pinkie.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

    3. Re:If you the currently available digits of Pi... by Scarletdown · · Score: 1

      Now rise for our hymn, In the Garden of Eden, by I. Ron Butterfly.

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      This space unintentionally left blank.
    4. Re:If you the currently available digits of Pi... by Mordaximus · · Score: 1

      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....

      Hope this doesn't give the RIAA any ideas; they couldn't possibly want Copyright to be shorter than a song!

  5. He promotes spyware. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:He promotes spyware. by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Firefox or Chrome? Because cancer is typically a part of an organism that isn't working properly.

  6. Wow! by dddux · · Score: 1

    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
    1. Re:Wow! by ClickOnThis · · Score: 1

      If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. -- John Cage

      --
      If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
  7. Too mainstream by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Where's the undergound pi?

    1. Re:Too mainstream by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      /sarcasm Their next album will be called "Metal Pipe" featuring (heavy/speed) Metal based on Pi -- probably because you need to be smoking something to enjoy it. ;-)

    2. Re:Too mainstream by Aighearach · · Score: 3, Funny

      Tao rock is always guaranteed to be twice as good as Pi pop.

  8. /Oblg. Starts getting good at 314159:26:53 ! by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

    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

    1. Re:/Oblg. Starts getting good at 314159:26:53 ! by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Funny

      So speaking of creepy, who here wants to connect a laptop to a crude AM radio transmitter, attach a few solar panels, stick it in the middle of Siberia somewhere, and give the intelligence community fits trying to find the pattern?

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    2. Re:/Oblg. Starts getting good at 314159:26:53 ! by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      Haha! That's just mean. =P

  9. So ... by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 1

    So he's essentially created a music generator that turns semi random numbers into semi listenable music.

  10. What is the most interesting irrational number? by shanen · · Score: 1

    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.
    1. Re:What is the most interesting irrational number? by Torodung · · Score: 1

      There's a 1998 movie about this...

    2. Re:What is the most interesting irrational number? by shanen · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the link, though I expected to be RickRolled. IMDb says it got 7.4 stars out of 10, but it doesn't sound interesting enough to read the quotes. (And why doesn't the trailer use upper case to make the URL more memorable?)

      However now I think you're actually accusing me of some sort of irrationality. Either that or you're projecting from the human tendency to see patterns where none exist.

      In contrast, as I understand the situation, I believe there are different degrees and even kinds of randomness. I'm pretty sure that the digits of pi have a high order of randomness, but my hypothesis is that some irrational numbers are quite different from others in terms of their randomness. Let me try to clarify with two examples of strange irrational numbers:

      (1) A more-zeroes number: Start with 0.1. At each iteration, you add a string of zeroes that is one longer than in the previous step, followed by a 1 to separate it. This irrational number would start 0.101001000100001000001... This irrational number is completely determined and shows an obvious pattern (and thus seems to lack randomness) but cannot be represented by any pair of finite integers.

      (2) A quick-coverage number: Starting from 1, for each positive integer add all of the strings of that length. (I've used base 10 for the example, though any base will work.) Easiest to do it in order, though you could actually make it shorter (in terms of string coverage) by considering the incidental overlaps (and still shorter with clever sequencing). This irrational number would start with 0.012345678900010203040506... (The shortened version might start 0.012345678900203040506.... where "01" has been removed from the 2-digit strings because it appeared earlier and "02" reuses the second "0" from "00".)

      These examples are algorithmic rather than formulaic. The first one cannot be assessed by the kind of metric used in the OEIS sequence I cited ( https://oeis.org/A036903 ), whereas the second one would have extremely low values, far below the statistical predictions if the digits were random.

      --
      Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
    3. Re:What is the most interesting irrational number? by shanen · · Score: 1

      For (2), I should have continued the 2-digit sequences past "12" to show the next deletion... That part's obvious, but I'm still wondering about how to order the digits for maximum shortening with full coverage at each n.

      --
      Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
  11. Still loading by jdavidb · · Score: 1

    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.
  12. Is it, really? by argStyopa · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Is it, really? by Aighearach · · Score: 1

      If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it, the phenomena of sound still happened.

      But if a bunch of switches on a computer are placed in a pattern, and it is never run through a DAC connected to a speaker, the phenomena of sound never happened.

      If nobody has listened to it, and nobody has played it on an instrument, and nobody even imagined the sound of the notes while writing it, it seems hard to call the whole thing a "song." That's separately from the apparent lack of musically creative artistic elements.

      Very little of it even rises to the level of a chime. Just as, a copper bell tossed into the ocean isn't a wind chime. But a pair of bottles tied to strings might be.

      Flatulence is probably closer to music than most of the data generated; at least it made a sound.

  13. Re:Here's a real song generated by Pi by Scarletdown · · Score: 1

    Pi R Round, not Square

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    This space unintentionally left blank.
  14. Re:Pi can be calculated. Why the big file? by Scarletdown · · Score: 2

    So what is stopping you? Hop to it and show everyone.

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    This space unintentionally left blank.
  15. The voice overs kill it by Early+Six+Digit+UID · · Score: 2

    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.

  16. Re:Great, yet another news story about Pi by Aighearach · · Score: 1

    Oh, digg, I heard of that, isn't that supposed to be the new slashdot?

  17. Hatsune Miku sings Pi by Guppy · · Score: 2

    I'd rather listen to Daniwell's version of Miku Hatsune singing 10,000 digits of Pi:

    https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch...

  18. Volume control? by ortholattice · · Score: 1

    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?

  19. So far, so nice... by bradley13 · · Score: 2

    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.
  20. Trance written by monkeys by Torodung · · Score: 1

    It sounds like trance music written by monkeys. Actually, monkeys might do better than an irrational number.

  21. Why stop at a billion? by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 1

    Why not just keep computing digits of pi as the song plays rather than stopping at a billion digits?