Debanuj Chatterjee

PhD student
Department of Physics, ENS Paris-Saclay
Paris

I try to combine specific ideas of mathematics and music to produce new genres of mathematical music. I often use prime numbers and other sequences to generate notes. By combining predictable musical notes and unpredictable notes generated from mathematical sequences I try to create balanced and aesthetically pleasing musical pieces.

Life and Chaos
Life and Chaos
digital medium
2019

This artwork is the visual representation of the Fourier spectrum of a musical piece that was generated using a computer program. Each cell in the picture is a musical note on the 88 key piano. The color intensity of the cell represents the key number.

This musical score was generated by mixing two musical patterns : 1. A well known simple musical tune 2. A tune sequence generated using the prime numbers.

For generating the prime number musical tune, I collected a large number of prime numbers in an array and divided all the elements of the array by 8 and stored the remainders. Since the remainders are always between 1 and 7, I could assign each element to a musical note and produce a musical sequence of notes.