Don Knuth's Selected Papers on Fun and Games gives an algorithm to harmonize an arbitrary melody with triads selected at random using base two representations of constants using a method devised by a man named Kraehenbuehl. For example he shows how to harmonize London Bridge is falling down using the binary expansions of pi and e. There are brief piano scores in the paper so that you can play them on a piano to hear them yourself. They sounds remarkably like church hymns from a 1956 Presbyterian hymnal I have near my piano. So conceivably the OEIS might do something like that ... it would require tweaking On Wednesday, September 9, 2015, Neil Sloane <njasloane@gmail.com> wrote:
To answer Warren's question from 2 days ago: basically all the OEIS algorithm does to sonify a sequence is to reduce the terms mod 88 to a note on the grand piano keyboard. You then get to adjust how the midi file is played, but "read mod 88" is the basic step.
This is very primitive and I wish we had something better.
The only kind of rating we have for how the "music" sounds is that there is a keyword "hear" that has been added to some sequences that someone has thought are worth listening to
There is also the keyword "look" for those that have remarkable graphs
Best regards Neil
Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation. 11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA. Also Visiting Scientist, Math. Dept., Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ. Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com Email: njasloane@gmail.com <javascript:;>
On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 11:44 AM, Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com <javascript:;>> wrote:
My theory of "what music is" is described here in the too-long and too-short versions respectively:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3507527/MusicTh.html https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3507527/MusicThShort.html
Re furthering the understanding of that whole question, it might be interesting to know which OEIS sequences sound the best & worst when converted to music. (And I do not know the method you use to convert them to music. Presumably many conversion methods are possible.) If you had a music-quality-rating for each, generated by OEIS users, then eventually we'd know that. (It also is possible some people might like while others dislike some music, e.g. the whole distribution of ratings on an 0-9 scale might be good to keep, not just its mean.)
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