Are you curious about the sound of pi? What sort of tune is the Dow Jones Industrial Average singing today? How does redwood DNA translate into an environmental symphony?
Music professor Jonathan N. Middleton and a team of students from the mathematics and computer science departments at Eastern Washington University have created a computer program and Web site that allows you to find out. It’s available at http://musicalgorithms.ewu.edu/.
In essence, the interactive program uses various algorithms to convert sequences of numbers into sounds—musical notes of varying pitch and duration. A visitor to the Web site simply follows the step-by-step directions, making decisions along the way that affect what’s heard in the end. Numbers go in, music comes out.