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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."
So, roughly half the songs performed by Tool then?
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.
"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.
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.
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
So what is stopping you? Hop to it and show everyone.
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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.
Tao rock is always guaranteed to be twice as good as Pi pop.
I'd rather listen to Daniwell's version of Miku Hatsune singing 10,000 digits of Pi:
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch...
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.