
The sound of space-filling curves - rrherr
http://www.win.tue.nl/~hermanh/doku.php?id=sound_of_space-filling_curves#two-dimensional
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seannyg
I'll admit that I went to the page skeptical, expecting another "let's see how
some arbitrary mathematical function turned into a song sounds," but I was
pleasantly surprised that some of these sound decent.

It makes me wonder: what if we take existing songs, try to find space-filling
curves that explain them, and then look for different paths through those
curves? In other words: would it be easy / possible to parameterize existing
songs as curves, so that we can find which subset of the space of space-
filling curves is actually interesting to human ears?

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pavel_lishin
I wish this was interactive; I'd love to follow the dots and watch the keys be
depressed.

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YeGoblynQueenne
Well that's interesting. The fast-playing 2d curve (the fourth audio file,
under "Meander fast track") sounds a lot like a solo, a taksim, in an oriental
scale - Ussak, perhaps, or Segah, although the tuning is western. It's like
music made out of a heavily stylised and simplified arabesque. So cool.

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laretluval
It would be an incredibly great visualization to show a dot moving around
reflecting your current position in the curve in the first picture.

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partycoder
To me the most impressive is the sample in the "Sampling at square centre
points and connecting points" section.

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nerdponx
Agreed. It seemed to even follow true chord changes instead of just bouncing
around.

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boodrizz
The synth cutting off and glitching are so irritating! Seems like a lot of
work to put into something to leave really jarring artifacts all over. If you
ever create or edit audio, all tracks and samples should start and end on the
zero crossing. Otherwise the jump "back" to zero introduces lots of noise.
Sticks out like a sore thumb on a spectograph

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theoh
Reminds me of the postscript to this Ben Krasnow video (from about 13:45)
which discusses an analogous effect in a circuit using a capacitor.
[https://youtu.be/xyMH8wKK-Ag](https://youtu.be/xyMH8wKK-Ag)

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jaequery
interesting.

on the same topic, i been also curious of something and wonder if anyone have
the answer to this.

lets say i have a track playing just one note (to be specific, a frequency
measured in hertz, lets say 528) for one minute and we want this to be as pure
sounding as possible.

what is the best approach to do this?

in addition, if the audio file is in WAV and we convert them to mp3, do we
still lose a lot of quality even though we are just playing same note for 1
minute?

how cam we achieve playing the purest sound without music file taking up too
much space?

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kd5bjo
In theory, an 1056 Hz 8-bit WAV file filled with alternating +127 and -127
samples will perfectly reproduce a 528 Hz tone. That's about 60kB in size, and
a traditional LZW compression (I.e. Zip) will work quite well due to the
repetition.

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jcims
Wouldn’t that likely end up as a sawtooth pattern at the speaker and thus
introduce a number of harmonics?

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kd5bjo
Not if the sound driver is doing its job properly -- it's generally bad form
to add harmonics above the Nyquist frequency[1] of the input file. If you do
have to deal with a buggy sound driver, you can use any small multiple of the
tone frequency as your sampling rate and still have efficient LZW compression.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem)

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jcims
Well I'll be...TIL - [https://imgur.com/a/vr580](https://imgur.com/a/vr580)

Actual sawtooth on the left (done at higher bit rate), tone on right is 2khz
tone at 8khz sample rate (audacity won't generate tone right at nyquist).
Looks like a triangle wave in audacity, but the tone is fairly pure with just
a whisper of harmonics, and those are probably from the speaker.

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ctchocula
Am I crazy or does this music sound Baroque/like Bach's music?

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sigil
Not at all! Two independent voices, stepwise motion — it’s almost
counterpoint.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint)

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epx
Looking forward for the inverse thing - convert Bach music into curves

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gliese1337
That won't be possible given the current mapping procedure. It imposes a
certain set of constraints on the space of possible tunes that are not obeyed
by any of Bach's works: A fixed number of voices (number of notes that can be
played simultaneously), greater than 1, with all voices always playing some
note (i.e., there are no rests).

If a piece of music does not obey those constraints, it cannot be back-
transformed into a continuous curve in a fixed number of dimensions. You would
need to come up with some other, more complex, method of mapping curves to
music in order to handle arbitrary musical compositions.

