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Jill

The music of the primes

Rob Beschizza at 7:20 am Mon, Oct 8, 2012

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Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

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Little-scale offers music procedurally-generated from prime numbers. A "full version", available for download, is 26 hours long. [Little-Scale]

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MORE:  math • music • prime numbers

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Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

  • awjt

    Dangit, I was hoping for an explainer, to see what they did.

  • 10xor01

    26 hours long

    Don’t let the CIA find out about this.

    • Boundegar

      It’s not torture, it’s enhanced interrogation, citizen.

  • Paul Renault

    I find this more pleasing than almost all of Webern’s Variations.  I could listen to it for quite a while.  Twenty-six hours, you say?

    Mind you, I’d rather listen to Tenney’s Ergodos II than Vebern.  Maybe if I’d been born in continental Europe, my tastes would be, er, educated?, conforming to expectations?  I find Vebern to be the auditory equivalent of Stieglitz’s Equivalents.  More on that later…

    Here’s one I wish would go on for half an hour, Euler’s Samba:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q75IbP6wvP0

  • s2redux

    Keith Jarrett — The M.I.T. Concert

  • gluther

    sounds a bit like Hauschka. http://hauschka-net.de/. 

  • Jay Converse

    So the high G# is the only variable note?  I don’t get it

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Holmen/562023961 Robert Holmén

     Interesting… but not for long.

    The one time I got an “A” as a music composition student at the U of North Texas was for my procedural music program for a Commodore-64:

    http://youtu.be/Qa1EyMyNbgo

    My professor was gobsmacked that I was doing something with my C-64 that he couldn’t do with his $10,000 “Synclavier”.  That’s when i decided to stop “studying” composition.

  • spacecoastweb

    I’ve long been interested in mathematically generated music.About 12 or 13 years ago I found a cool little freeware program that creates midi files based on a mathematical sequence related to the Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence.

    The human ear finds self-similarity pleasing, so the Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence and related sequences seem to be good candidates for music generation. The complexity of this generated music, (when several sequences are mapped to different instruments and played alongside one another), is astounding.

    MusiNum – The Music in the Numbers http://reglos.de/musinum/

  • batchild

    My son was so very disappointed this wasn’t Chocolate Rain.