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Comment by IDisposableHero | Hacker News Reader

This is very well explained, but not all that novel. Brian Eno used to generate long soundscapes like this, using loops of mutually prime lengths of time.

Edit: See also -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_1:_Music_for_Airports

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music

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It also is the core of "method ringing", a kind of bell ringing from the 17th century and persisting today. Imagine some folks clanging away at 10 bells in a church tower for hours on end, never repeating, and never developing a melody. Each person is operating a single bell and repeating their pattern with a unique period.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_ringing

Ringing the changes uses permutations. The described method uses relatively prime numbers.

Both produce music according to a simple algorithm, but the algorithms are different.

Hah, that trumps my example by 200 years. Well done.

Except for the small detail that it isn't true. In change ringing, what you do is to cycle through some subset of the permutations of N bells. So you might begin 123456 123465 124365 and so on. The whole thing is made up of blocks of N bells in each of which each bell is rung once. Therefore, all bells have (on average) the same period: one ring, on average, out of every N.

The bells are hung in such a way that they naturally want to swing with equal periods, so you don't have to disturb one too much to make it ring one place earlier or later in the cycle. (A bell is never moved by more than two places.)

I don't see any reason why a peal of bells couldn't be set up to produce the effect jws described, but it wouldn't be at all the same thing as change ringing.

But each individual in method ringing is repeating their pattern. (at least as Wikipedia explains it.)

Yes it is a known technique also in 3D games. Related, but more complicated (research) topic is infinite/arbitrarily-sized non-looping texture generation from arbitrary sample images.

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~vordonezroma/texturesynth.pdf

(There are some mind blowing generated images in the linked PDF.)

The experimental-music band Bull of Heaven recently released a prime-looping generative piece that they project will last 8,462,937,602,125,701,219,674,955.2362595095 years before repeating.

http://bullofheaven.com/media/260.html

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