
The Ancient Melodies - tilt
http://theancientmelodies.com/
======
zzalpha
This is nothing more than numerology... just parodeilia in another form.

Illuminating, in that it shows just how powerful the human brain is at pattern
matching and finding false order in even random noise, particularly if we help
it out by working the data a bit to produce a pleasing result.

Random? Why yes. See, the current conjecture is that Pi is a Normal Number:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number)

"[This] means that no digit, or combination of digits, occurs more frequently
than any other, and this is true whether the number is written in base 10,
binary, or any other base."

Put another way, "A normal number can be thought of as an infinite sequence of
coin flips (binary) or rolls of a die (base 6)."

~~~
antimagic
Which is fair enough. It does make me wonder though if you tried representing
the duration in base 4 of pi, or something like that, whether you couldn't
create something that sounded quite nice. Probably not, but I admit that if it
was something I could whip up easily, I would do the experiment :)

~~~
zzalpha
Well, random signals can sound nice... I do enjoy the white noise of wind
blowing through trees. :)

But it's still a random signal, regardless of its apparent aesthetic
qualities. Any hint of structure is just the human brain doing what it does so
well: pattern matching.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a grilled cheese sandwich I need to pray to...
;)

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tribune
Impressive musical presentation of what would otherwise be random noise. If
the duration of the notes was constant and the chords were left off this
wouldn't sound like anything remarkable.

This reminds me of the article on recurrent neural network composers I saw on
here awhile back. They were able to produce music that sounded quite good in
short sections. Over the longer term, though, it was easy to see that they
lacked what makes any sort of music interesting and artful: recurring themes
and movements. The music superficially sounded pleasant, but was ultimately
not that exciting to listen to because it lacked emotion.

Being able to make note transitions sound nice is one thing. Finding classical
music in an irrational number is another. We'll sooner find lizard men in the
rocks on Mars.

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an_ko
Cool idea, but that the chords and note durations were chosen deliberately by
a human makes me significantly less impressed. Can a random number sequence
(or e.g. whatever other real number with a long decimal expansion) not be made
to sound passable by similarly changing durations to emphasise certain notes?
What's musically special about _pi_ and _e_?

~~~
tobr
Vi Hart has an excellent video about music written with all twelve tones of
the octave.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794)

