Canton Becker, an electronic music composer and programmer, composed a procedurally generated song that uses the first billion digits of pi as its input.
I haven't listened to all 114 years of the song yet, but I like what I have heard so far.
From his statement:
Becker programmed — or composed — an algorithm to generate music using the first one billion digits of pi (π).
These digits supply the "turn signals" used to determine every musical expression in the song. Each digit (3.1415...)
is responsible for orchestrating approximately four seconds of music. The electronic instruments and sound
samples were prepared by Becker in advance.Because the numbers in pi never repeat, each one of the million hours in "Shepard's Pi” is in fact unique. Listeners
who fast forward to some distant moment in the song are virtually guaranteed to find themselves listening to
something that nobody else – including the composer himself – has ever heard before.
