The Ancient Melodies

This is nothing more than numerology... just parodeilia in another form.

Illuminating, in that it shows just how powerful the human brain is at pattern matching and finding false order in even random noise, particularly if we help it out by working the data a bit to produce a pleasing result.

Random? Why yes. See, the current conjecture is that Pi is a Normal Number:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

"[This] means that no digit, or combination of digits, occurs more frequently than any other, and this is true whether the number is written in base 10, binary, or any other base."

Put another way, "A normal number can be thought of as an infinite sequence of coin flips (binary) or rolls of a die (base 6)."

Impressive musical presentation of what would otherwise be random noise. If the duration of the notes was constant and the chords were left off this wouldn't sound like anything remarkable.

This reminds me of the article on recurrent neural network composers I saw on here awhile back. They were able to produce music that sounded quite good in short sections. Over the longer term, though, it was easy to see that they lacked what makes any sort of music interesting and artful: recurring themes and movements. The music superficially sounded pleasant, but was ultimately not that exciting to listen to because it lacked emotion.

Being able to make note transitions sound nice is one thing. Finding classical music in an irrational number is another. We'll sooner find lizard men in the rocks on Mars.

Cool idea, but that the chords and note durations were chosen deliberately by a human makes me significantly less impressed. Can a random number sequence (or e.g. whatever other real number with a long decimal expansion) not be made to sound passable by similarly changing durations to emphasise certain notes? What's musically special about pi and e?