Show HN: Playing Piano with Prime Numbers
nabraj.comI decided to turn prime numbers into a mini piano and see what kind of music they could make.
Inspired by: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44888548
I decided to turn prime numbers into a mini piano and see what kind of music they could make.
Inspired by: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44888548
Nice job. Related, I remember seeing an attempt at mapping primes to minor scales a few years back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duVyBVNX3D8
Very cool.
Primes have such an irregular yet structured distribution, and mapping them to pitches is a clever way to make that hidden pattern audible.
I don't think there's any insight available here. I doubt anyone could distinguish this from an RNG fed into the same algorithm without memorizing.
I wonder how it sounds if you map the primes straight onto Hz instead of piano scales.
It won't be a musical scale if mapped directly to Hz (maybe sine wave mapping?).
For example, prime 2 → 2 Hz (inaudible), 101 → 101 Hz (deep bass), 1009 → ~1 kHz (bright tone).
Right now the app just maps primes to MIDI notes so they sit nicely on a piano.