Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Make music with the Pi!


This is what you get if you happened to be equally skillful at two unrelated subjects.

Paul Slocum, an artiste and musician from Texas, USA has managed to devise an innovative way to conjure up random musical notes using an old amplifier connected to a laptop. The musician with a secret passion for programming (and Math’s of course!) has developed a software, called the “Pi House Generator” which progressively calculates the sequence of digits in Pi. (For the numerically challenged, the value of Pi “starts” at 3.14 and continues until infinity). What the software does is to “calculate” the digits and feeds the results into an algorithmic music generator that stores what Paul calls his “structural criteria for house music.”

The result is an unending, non-repetitive stream of “house” music, which in theory, should go on and on. However, there is a problem. The number of processor cycles required to calculate the value of Pi too keeps on increasing with every digit added -- and at one point of time, the processor will lose steam and would be unable to calculate the digits fast enough to be “playable”. As for the fix, keep on upgrading your hardware (and pray windows won’t crash). With Moore’s law here to help, you can be pretty sure that the processor power per dollar increases at an exponential too. This will help you constantly increase the computing power and the song can be played indefinitely.

The software, originally intended for personal use could end up very soon in your download folders – should the creator relent.

Via: Noiseaddicts

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