Paul Slocum’s “Pi House Generator” creates an evolving soundtrack of house music which goes on forever(almost) –
The software progressively calculates the sequence of digits in pi, starting at 3.14 and progressing towards infinity. As the program calculates the digits, it feeds the results into an algorithmic music generator containing my structural criteria for house music. The resulting piece of house music is infinitely long and static and never repeats itself.
The number of processor cycles required to calculate pi increase with the number of digits it is calculated to. After months or years of playing the song, any fixed computer hardware will be unable to calculate the digits fast enough for the song to play continuously.
Listen to a sample of the math-dance dream in action here – Paul Slocum is an artist and musician …
Update: It seems Jonah already covered this one – but it’s still just as cool!
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Big box o’ techno
4 thoughts on “Pi music all night long …”
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A quick way around the limitation of the processor cycles would be to address 22/7 as if you were doing ‘long division’
ie: calculate how many times 7 goes into your ‘remainder’ and then store the remainder and divide 7 into that, until you have the number of digits required to construct the music.
slapyak, I don’t think the point is to generate music from an approximation of pi, especially considering that there are all sorts of algorithms for actually calculating pi fairly quickly. Some of them are quite efficient, and you’ll probably have some other problem with your computer before you run out of digits.