2019 Bridges Conference

Debanuj Chatterjee

Artists

Debanuj Chatterjee

PhD student

Department of Physics, ENS Paris-Saclay

Paris

chatterjeefrance@gmail.com

Statement

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.

Artworks

Image for entry 'Life and Chaos'

Life and Chaos

digital medium

2019

Additional info

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.