Experimental sonic pi sound scripts based on algorithms (starting with tower of hanoi)
It's a simple recursive algorithm which solves a tower of hanoi problem. The sound is about the movement which happens while the problem is being solved.
There are different sounds for movements from left to middle, middle to right and so on.
In addition there is a special sound which appears when one hanoi problem (so also the recursive sub problems) has solved. The intensity of this sound is higher if a bigger tower was moved, so the loudest sound of this type is at the end when the hole problem was solved.
You could easily play around and test for bigger towers or change the sound effects.
There is also a mp3 file available so you could hear it (without extra installing sonic pi just to for hearing) (of course this is only one recorded version of it, currently it's the one of tag version 1.0.0)
It's a simple recursive algorithm of quicksort.
The sounds are here represented by numbers which are natively used as higher and lower beep tones in sonic pi. The range from 40 to 115 is used here but also many subtones between them. Without changing the parameter are list of 300 items between this range is created (0.25 steps simple increasing)
This list is then randomized and played. The beauty of playing the random list is to give a hint how random values sounds. Then there is a 2 second break.
After this step the quicksort starts. Every number which is compared (for moving to low or high set) will play it's tone.
You could hear that first it sounds also quite random. Then at some point you hear the fine sorting on the low tones. Then it goes back to some in between lists for the middle tones. And so on until it ends with fine tuning the high tones (sorry for that it's not so nice for the ears ;)) After quick search has finished there is also a 2 second break.
After the hole algorithm has finished you will hear the sorted version of the list.
You could easily play around and change parameters. To maybe hear longer lists, or even the worst case, a pre sorted list ;)!
There is also a mp3 file available so you could hear it (without extra installing sonic pi just to for hearing) (of course this is only one recorded version of it, currently it's the one of tag version 1.0.0)
The sound here represents all comparisons done while the bubble sort algorithm is executed (similar to the quicksort variant).
Also here you would first hear the random list of tones. Then a 2 seconds delay. Then the actual sound of the algorithm. Again a 2 second delay and then the sorted list. The frequency bandwidth of tones is the same here as for quicksort (40 to 115). But this time only 100 items are used because this algorithm gets incredible slow if we fit it with 300 or 400 like we do in the quicksort example. You could hear that it's a smaller dataset in the list when you hear the random and or the sorted list, because the length of playing it is proportional to the items of the list.
Also here i have put a sound file close to the source code. (just for getting an idea without the need of executing it on sonic pi)
Simple naive recursive algorithm for calculating the n'th fibonacci value.
Technically the fibonacci is calculated two times, first to find the maximum number which has to be represented as a sound. It's used for converting numbers to representable tones.
So, the second round is the one which plays sound for all calculated intermediate results.
Most of the time fibonacci is working on the relatively low numbers, that's why the sound has only low frequencies until it's almost finished.
There is also a fibonacci version with a simple caching included, this is of course much faster. But it sounded nearly the same (because even if we don't repeat the calculation of low fibonaccies thousand of times, all calculations are still very low numbers compared to the numbers in the "end rounds". (maybe in the future there will be a variant where we convert the numbers not linear but logarithmic, would be interesting)
The none cache versions which you could hear as a downloadable mp3 calculates the fibonacci of 16. The cache variant calculated the fibonacci of 200 (which would kind of take forever without cache)