Comments on: by the numbers

by the numbers

madamjujujive — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:59:43 -0800

Pi to 1,000 places on piano is just one of the many catchy tunes on math sonifications. And check out more interesting things on on artist Tom Dukich's site.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:04:24 -0800

Hmm, how can you "catch" something totally random? There is a lot of redundancy in the song, but the digits of pi, I think, are totally random (right?) so any pattern in the song is the result of the software used to create it, not the numbers themselves.

By: Mr.Encyclopedia

Mr.Encyclopedia — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:14:29 -0800

Well, since they just mapped 0-9 to a note on a piano there's not much room for any patterns from software to arise.

By: madamjujujive

madamjujujive — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:19:39 -0800

delmoi, I characterized as "catchy" rather tongue in cheek. I sometimes forget the printed word doesn't pick up the inflections in my head ;-)

By: zeugitai_guy

zeugitai_guy — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:28:59 -0800

Well, since they just mapped 0-9 to a note on a piano there's not much room for any patterns from software to arise. Additionally, the human mind often tends to locate patterns where none exists. For instance, I don't notice when my CD player in the car is on random shuffle and plays 15 different songs one after another, but I'm sure to notice if it plays the same song twice in a row, even though that's a pretty likely occurrence under totally random conditions. I had the same feeling of catching fleeting pieces of patterns in the Pi song, but I have no doubt the patterns were based more on familiarity with the notes themselves than their ordering.

By: homunculus

homunculus — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:36:56 -0800

madamjujujive sure does love the piano.

By: ZachsMind

ZachsMind — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:52:17 -0800

Y'know I bet if someone were to put a backbeat to this and some chord progressions, it'd pass for lite jazz or whatever new age music is called nowadays. Maybe Yanni could do the notes with a pan flute or something.

By: ZachsMind

ZachsMind — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:56:00 -0800

Ah... They already got people workin on it.

By: ZachsMind

ZachsMind — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:57:46 -0800

That's what I get of course for not clicking on all the links before opening my big mouth. After actually hearing attempts to make sense out of this musically, I can honestly opine that this is actually worse than pop music.

By: treepour

treepour — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 21:12:44 -0800

Neat, but . . . It's just the number 0-9 mapped onto major scale. Seems like there should be more creative ways to approach this. Why not let pi influence other properties, such as duration or dynamics?

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 21:13:00 -0800

If you listen for an infinite amount of time, you will hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

By: b1tr0t

b1tr0t — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 21:19:44 -0800

All it needs is a filter sweep and an amen break.

By: the_bone

the_bone — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 21:44:05 -0800

Why not let pi influence other properties, such as duration or dynamics? That's a pretty sweet idea... kinda reminds me of the "total serialization" practices of Boulez and Babbitt.

By: kisch mokusch

kisch mokusch — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:12:21 -0800

There is often something instinctively pleasing to the human condition when mathematics is applied to art. This is not one of those times.

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:14:28 -0800

So cool mjjj! The first person to make the connection between math and music was Pythagoras of Samos... Tom Dukich's site is full of interesting things, like his sonifiction of weather. Love his contemporary birdhouses too.

By: tighttrousers

tighttrousers — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:51:43 -0800

Eerily reminiscent of György Ligeti

By: ob

ob — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 23:00:15 -0800

Yeah, this is a pretty unimaginative use of mathematics and music. It's not that this is a bad post, far from it, but rather that on the annals of contemporary music there are much more interesting and therefore musical ways to deal with music and mathematical phenomena.

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 23:02:02 -0800

*sonification.

By: chuckdarwin

chuckdarwin — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 02:02:11 -0800

I prefer Kate Bush's take on Pi.

By: erniepan

erniepan — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:25:33 -0800

I prefer Hard N Phirm's take on Pi. Or Darren Aronofsky's.

By: MtDewd

MtDewd — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 04:20:05 -0800

Or Yann Martel's.

By: the_bone

the_bone — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:24:58 -0800

Hmm, another way to make this more interesting might be to do some sort of polyphony... for instance, if the notes in the main melody are primarily played as eighth notes, for instance, another voice could be introduced moving primarily in whole notes, and then another moving in whole notes tied to each other. The resulting harmonies could be neat in a pandiatonic sort of way. Maybe I'll work something up for MeFi Music next weekend (won't have time before then). Now that I think about it, I don't think applying pi to duration is a good solution. I think the rhythms need more structure/repetition, not less. While I can appreciate the theory behind serial music, I think it never caught on with the public because it's too difficult to hear the patterns therein... and even serial music has an advantage over something as random as pi in that it's actually highly structured.

By: b1tr0t

b1tr0t — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 08:02:16 -0800

It might make more sense to convert pi to octal before you send it to the piano.

By: lupus_yonderboy

lupus_yonderboy — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 09:21:58 -0800

This is really stupid. 1. This is really old. My friend Geoff King did a piece just like this for flute in, shit, the 70s? when he was a composer-in-residence at MIT. Everyone who studies serialism probably does this. 2. Delmoi asked if the digits of pi are "random" -- ie, normally distributed. At least as of a few years ago, no one actually knows! What we do know is that the first million or so appear to be normally distributed in a bunch of ways. What that means is that in practice this piece is indistinguishable from one where you roll a 10-sided die to get the pitches. 3. As several people pointed out, "10" is a stupid number when you're taking 12 semitones per octave, or 8 notes per major key scale. (It probably makes more sense to convert pi to base 12, because otherwise your notes won't be evenly spread over the keyboard). There are definitely better ways to translate pi into a series of numbers which exhibit some sort of structure that humans would find interesting. This piece shows no feeling for mathematics or for music.

By: weston

weston — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:10:45 -0800

"Because he was too tired to think particularly constructively tonight he savagely selected and copied a whole swathe of figures from the spreadsheet at random, pasted them into his own conversion program, which scaled and filtered and manipulated the figures according to his own experimental algorithms, loaded the converted file into Performer, a powerful sequencer program, and played the result through random MIDI channels to whichever synthesisers happened to be on at the moment. The result was a short burst of the most hideous cacophony, and he stopped it. He ran the conversion program again, this time instructing it to force-map the pitch values into G minor. This was a utility he was determined in the end to get rid of because he regarded it as cheating. If there was any basis to his firmly held belief that the rhythms and harmonies of music which he found most satisfying could be found in, or at least derived from, the rhythms and harmonies of naturally occurring phenomena, then satisfying forms of modality and intonation should emerge naturally as well, rather than being forced. For the moment, though, he forced it. The result was a short burst of the most hideous cacophony in G minor. So much for random shortcuts." — Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

By: Twang

Twang — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 14:52:50 -0800

This really simple-minded approach tends to be annoying quickly, especially when a static, percussive timbre like piano is used. Treepour's right that the result *can* be made more interesting by letting pi influence other properties, such as duration or dynamics. Just imposing a rhythm or a few phrase structures helps a lot in making the result more musical. We quickly miss repetitive structures. Wolfram has done a good thing with math notes.

By: Quietgal

Quietgal — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 07:36:37 -0800

I'm at work now so I can't listen to anything (shhh!), but there's another application of music to natural phenomena that's pretty neat: protein sequences. These are not totally random, as the digits of pi appear to be, and although the (untrained) eye can't really pick out any motifs from a printed-out protein sequence, the ear can definitely hear repeat motifs and variations. I remember going to a seminar where a musical sequence was played on a cassette recorder (yeah, it was that long ago), and it was astonishing how much structure you could hear in that protein.

By: treepour

treepour — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:49:06 -0800

Hey, that Wolfram tones thing is very nifty. I just lost an hour or so to it, and suspect I will lose more in days to come.

By: ZachsMind

ZachsMind — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 10:11:55 -0800

I got it! Take pi out to ten decimal places, play that over and over again, give it a backbeat and a synthesized symphonic harmony, have some gorgeous blonde coo and ooh breathfully through a microphone, echo that and run it through a few algorhythms to make her sound sexier, and you'd have an immediate top ten hit that'd last long enough to make lost of money. 1. Use pi for pop. 2. something something something 3. PROFIT!

By: b1tr0t

b1tr0t — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 21:04:26 -0800

ZashsMind: I call prior art! You owe me royalties! All it needs is a filter sweep and an amen break.

By: chrismear

chrismear — Thu, 03 May 2007 12:20:59 -0800

This post inspired me to print out the 1,000 note pi sequence used by that site, to see if I could turn it into something a bit more musical by improvising a slushy piano piece around it.