To create this π music, I found a line in the "pi" article which had "An estimate of π accurate to 1120 decimal digits (by John Wrench and Levi Smith) obtained using a gear-driven calculator in 1948 -- the most accurate estimate of π before electronic computers came into use." I then converted each number into the proper musical note and made a MIDI file of that with ABCexplorer. Unfortunately neither YouTube nor Wikimedia can handle .mid files (YouTube wants MP3's and Wikimedia wants Ogg files) and my shareware trial mp3 converter would only convert the first 60 seconds, so I'm not sure how many notes long it is. I used VLC media player to convert from mp3 to ogg.

  • π, using a 10-length diatonic scale (C D E F G A B c d e in ABC notation).
  • π, using a chromatic scale (well, not the whole thing, just C ^C D ^D E F ^F G ^G A in ABC notation since there are only 10 numbers in our base 10 counting system).
  • π, using a pentatonic scale (honestly, I don't remember how I spaced it, but it went over a few octaves since I didn't transpose to make the "original" 5-note scale fit into one octave).
  • π, using a decatonic scale (C _D D E F _G G _A _B B in ABC notation). After I did chromatic, diatonic, and pentatonic, I figured I'd see what a 10-length scale sounded like (since there are 10 numbers in base 10).