Binary Music

I've always enjoyed counting in binary on my fingers, where up means zero and down means one. For those of you unfamiliar with binary, the first few numbers look like this;

0 => 0

1 => 1

2 => 10

3 => 11

4 => 100

5 => 101

6 => 110

7 => 111

8 => 1000

9 => 1001

10 => 1010

ad infinitum. Notice that all the powers of two are a one followed by zeros.

One day while sitting at the piano I decided to see what it would sound like if I played the same thing; a key pressed down meant 1, and a key up meant 0. To my surprise, it was a half-decent song! Here is the sheet music done in Finale Notepad.

Here is the song rendered in piano.

You can download this mp3 here.


Here is the song rendered in pure sine waves.


You can download this mp3 here.

There are 3 main reasons this is a reasonably enjoyable song.

1. The first two digits provide the beat by cycling through 00, 01, 10, 11.
2. The highest digit provides a melody which gets higher at a decreasing rate. This causes tension, especially when the highest digit is playing a B for about half the song. Since the C, or tonic note, is right above B, your brain feels pulled toward it.
   
3. The chord "progression" created by the middle digits has a tendency to clear up as soon as things get cluttered. As you can see in the video, this is intrinsic to the nature of counting in binary. Moreover, the clearing up slows down as the song continues (eventually leading to a full mess of 01111111) which further contributes to the tension.

I decided to end with 10010101, giving a nice major chord, and more time after tension release than ending at 10000001.

-Alex Scott