Canton Becker, an electronic music composer and programmer, composed a procedurally generated song that uses the first billion digits of pi as its input.
I haven't listened to all 114 years of the song yet, but I like what I have heard so far.
From his statement:
Becker programmed — or composed — an algorithm to generate music using the first one billion digits of pi (π). These digits supply the "turn signals" used to determine every musical expression in the song. Each digit (3.1415...) is responsible for orchestrating approximately four seconds of music. The electronic instruments and sound samples were prepared by Becker in advance.
Because the numbers in pi never repeat, each one of the million hours in "Shepard's Pi” is in fact unique. Listeners who fast forward to some distant moment in the song are virtually guaranteed to find themselves listening to something that nobody else – including the composer himself – has ever heard before.
Becker told me "here’s one of my favorite 20 minutes so far, from around hour 10,470."
Happy pi day! Today we think of pi as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (3.14…). But in the olden days (and even today) some people thought pi should be the ratio of a circle’s radius to its diameter (6.28…), Today, that symbol is called tau, and in some cases, it makes […]
One of my all time favorite singers.
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