Musician Creates a Million-Hour Song Based On the Number Pi (vice.com) 65
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."
Million hour song (Score:4, Funny)
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Ouch! Cue the inevitable flame war between Tool and Muse fans. =P
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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 emp
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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".
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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.
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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.
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Tool songs aren't actually a million hours long. They just seem that way.
Stupid bullshit. (Score:1)
Auto-generated song sounds as expected. Ambience at best. Stupid. Pointless.
Re: Stupid bullshit. (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.
There's a joke here somewhere. (Score:5, 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.
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If you the currently available digits of Pi... (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....
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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.
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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.
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Now rise for our hymn, In the Garden of Eden, by I. Ron Butterfly.
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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!
He promotes spyware. (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.
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Firefox or Chrome? Because cancer is typically a part of an organism that isn't working properly.
Wow! (Score:2)
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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
Too mainstream (Score:1)
Where's the undergound pi?
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/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. ;-)
Re:Too mainstream (Score:4, Funny)
Tao rock is always guaranteed to be twice as good as Pi pop.
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Oh, digg, I heard of that, isn't that supposed to be the new slashdot?
/Oblg. Starts getting good at 314159:26:53 ! (Score:2)
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
Re:/Oblg. Starts getting good at 314159:26:53 ! (Score:5, 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?
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Haha! That's just mean. =P
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Pi R Round, not Square
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So what is stopping you? Hop to it and show everyone.
So ... (Score:2)
What is the most interesting irrational number? (Score:2)
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 [oeis.org], 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 se
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There's a 1998 movie [youtube.com] about this...
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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.
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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.
Still loading (Score:2)
Is it, really? (Score:4, 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... [youarelistening.to]) but while pleasant, soothing, and all those things - still not really a SONG.
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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 e
The voice overs kill it (Score:2)
Hatsune Miku sings Pi (Score:3)
I'd rather listen to Daniwell's version of Miku Hatsune singing 10,000 digits of Pi:
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch... [nicovideo.jp]
Volume control? (Score:2)
So far, so nice... (Score:3)
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.
Trance written by monkeys (Score:2)
It sounds like trance music written by monkeys. Actually, monkeys might do better than an irrational number.
Why stop at a billion? (Score:2)