The sound of space-filling curves • Hacker News Board

Re: The sound of space-filling curves

#11

Post by theoh » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

boodrizz wrote: post #3

The synth cutting off and glitching are so irritating! Seems like a lot of work to put into something to leave really jarring artifacts all over. If you ever create or edit audio, all tracks and samples should start and end on the zero crossing. Otherwise the jump "back" to zero introduces lots of noise. Sticks out like a sore thumb on a spectograph

Reminds me of the postscript to this Ben Krasnow video (from about 13:45) which discusses an analogous effect in a circuit using a capacitor. https://youtu.be/xyMH8wKK-Ag

Re: The sound of space-filling curves

#12

Post by kd5bjo » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

jcims wrote: post #9

kd5bjo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, an 1056 Hz 8-bit WAV file filled with alternating +127 and -127 samples will perfectly reproduce a 528 Hz tone. That's about 60kB in size, and a traditional LZW compression (I.e. Zip) will work quite well due to the repetition.

Wouldn’t that likely end up as a sawtooth pattern at the speaker and thus introduce a number of harmonics?

Not if the sound driver is doing its job properly -- it's generally bad form to add harmonics above the Nyquist frequency[1] of the input file. If you do have to deal with a buggy sound driver, you can use any small multiple of the tone frequency as your sampling rate and still have efficient LZW compression.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...

Re: The sound of space-filling curves

#13

Post by ctchocula » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 11:20 PM UTC

Am I crazy or does this music sound Baroque/like Bach's music?

Re: The sound of space-filling curves

#14

Post by laretluval » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 11:43 PM UTC

ctchocula wrote: post #13

Am I crazy or does this music sound Baroque/like Bach's music?

It seems to share some of the complexity of that kind of music.

I wonder if space-filling curves tap into the same complexity as a classically-structured fugue in some kind of deep way.

Re: The sound of space-filling curves

#15

Post by laretluval » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 11:44 PM UTC

It would be an incredibly great visualization to show a dot moving around reflecting your current position in the curve in the first picture.

Re: The sound of space-filling curves

#16

Post by sigil » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 12:38 AM UTC

ctchocula wrote: post #13

Am I crazy or does this music sound Baroque/like Bach's music?

Not at all! Two independent voices, stepwise motion — it’s almost counterpoint. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpoint

Re: The sound of space-filling curves

#17

Post by epx » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 3:14 AM UTC

Looking forward for the inverse thing - convert Bach music into curves

Re: The sound of space-filling curves

#18

Post by gliese1337 » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 4:08 AM UTC

epx wrote: post #17

Looking forward for the inverse thing - convert Bach music into curves

That won't be possible given the current mapping procedure. It imposes a certain set of constraints on the space of possible tunes that are not obeyed by any of Bach's works: A fixed number of voices (number of notes that can be played simultaneously), greater than 1, with all voices always playing some note (i.e., there are no rests).

If a piece of music does not obey those constraints, it cannot be back-transformed into a continuous curve in a fixed number of dimensions. You would need to come up with some other, more complex, method of mapping curves to music in order to handle arbitrary musical compositions.

Re: The sound of space-filling curves

#19

Post by nerdponx » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 2:18 PM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #7

To me the most impressive is the sample in the "Sampling at square centre points and connecting points" section.

Agreed. It seemed to even follow true chord changes instead of just bouncing around.

Re: The sound of space-filling curves

#20

Post by jcims » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 8:09 PM UTC

jaequery wrote: post #5

interesting. on the same topic, i been also curious of something and wonder if anyone have the answer to this. lets say i have a track playing just one note (to be specific, a frequency measured in hertz, lets say 528) for one minute and we want this to be as pure sounding as possible. what is the best approach to do this? in addition, if the audio file is in WAV and we convert them to mp3, do we still lose a lot of…

Most compact option would probably be a function generator feeding samples to the audio device.