Centaur

A website demonstrating Kraig Grady's "Centaur" music tuning system.

Hear it

1. Turn your volume down
2. Open Google Chrome or Safari
3. Visit http://centaur.jonathanmarmor.com
4. Turn your volume back up carefully

How the music works

• There are three voices
• All voices obey the following rules:
• A duration is chosen for each note, with no input from what has come before
• 72% of the time a note's duration is between 110 and 310 milliseconds
• 28% of the time a note's duration is between 800 and 2100 milliseconds
• If the previous duration was long (>800ms), 15% of the time rest for 800 to 3000ms
• Each pitch is within three steps up or down from the previous pitch
• Pitches can't be repetitions of the previous pitch in the same voice
• Pitches can't be outside a four octave range

Kraig Grady's "Centaur" tuning

Read more about the tuning at The North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island.

Synth, credit

Uses the synth file from this beautiful thing. The sound used is a very slight modification of aike1000's analog synth sound. Thank you, @aike1000.

Run your own on Ubuntu

Locally:

git clone https://github.com/jonathanmarmor/ops.git
pip install fabric
cd ops
fab -H <hostname> centaur.install

(I found this photograph of a Centaur on the internet. I hope he doesn't mind me using his likeness and the photographer is happy splitting all proceeds 50/50.)