two to the one-hundred and seventy-sixth power

January 21, 2017 · by · in ,

 

… is the number of patterns you can make* on a 909 drum machine.  Inspired by a dinner talk with my friend Mike Dean, I made a nice little thing that is going to play every one of them back, from now until a very long time in the future**.

Given that I had a sequencer lying around, this was not that hard to do – when the page loads, I calculate the current time-since-start (January 21, 2017, ), turn that into a binary number, and then that number as the pattern.  Each bar, I increment the number, and ta-daaaa!  Music that will take more than a trillion trillion trillion thousand years to finish!

I saw somewhere recently the line that “music is counting without thinking” – this project sure makes the counting bit obvious.

 

* A real 909 can have either an open hat or a closed hat – I went with both, because it is much easier to make work.

** I was going to use Bignumber.js to represent the time, but I forgot that everything will get weird in 2038, so I just used typical timestamps.