π Music

Over at NoiseAddicts, a dude name Paul Slocum hooked a crappy old amp to his little laptop, told the laptop to continuously calculate the digits of the magical constant π and turned those numbers into synth commands for house music.

Using his homemade software called “Pi House Generator”, it randomly generates house music using the number π , and much like the number itself, the music stream never repeats and constantly continues to evolve. Says the creator :

“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.

The rate that the number of processor cycles increase per pi-digits is bound by the formula Z*log(N); however based on Moore’s Law, processor power per dollar increases at an exponential rate - doubling every two years. BY upgrading computers regularly with market trends, the song can be played indefinitely.

New pi digits are calculated every minute or so, and they are used to choose sample points, sample arrangement, drum samples, and drum patterns. I also use the pi digits to seed a pseudo-random number generator so that I can generate as many random numbers as I need from a pi digit set. Also, some elements are cyclic, like the samples sets used and general arrangement limitations.

You can listen to a sample of the stream here, and if you want to geek out about π , go here .