Show HN: Playing Piano with Prime Numbers

nabraj.com

8 pointscoffeecoders5 comments

I decided to turn prime numbers into a mini piano and see what kind of music they could make.

Nice job. Related, I remember seeing an attempt at mapping primes to minor scales a few years back.

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.